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News FOX selling out to Disney?

RE: Timing

Most of the articles in the trades reporting this purchase have stated that the regulatory review process and the legal aspects of this 'sale' will take an estimated 12 - 18 months before final closing.

In the mean time, until that process is completed, they are two distinctly separate companies. Anything currently in the pipeline at FOX will be subject to FOX executives and their own direction.
 
^And that's assuming the regulators even approve the sale as legal. It may also be subject to court challenges and lawsuits that could delay its implementation. The Writers' Guild of America has gone on record denouncing the merger as bad for screenwriters because it would take away one of the few remaining major markets for their work. There will be resistance to this.
 
Very true, Christopher. The regulators may force portions of the acquired business be sold off to third parties in order to allow the sale to be finalized. For example, Disney may end up with the FOX film unit, but may be force to sell off the TV production unit. One never knows, but I don't think the final "approved by regulators' deal will look like what we're reading about now. The ATT-Time Warner deal has hit a major snag, I do not see this one just gliding smoothly through the system.

Q2
 
Alidar Jarok said:
The deal isn't official until it gets regulatory approval, which is expected to take 18 months. Not only will post-production be complete before that happens, the movie will be in theaters before it happens.
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Good point.

I suppose there could be some influence and 'discussions' but that makes cancellation look unlikely.
 
Q2UnME said:
. For example, Disney may end up with the FOX film unit, but may be force to sell off the TV production unit.
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That sounds likely, and I thought I had read (maybe it was here?) a claim that Disney would only be interested in FOX to get total control of Star Wars, to get at the distribution side of things. Making a whole go at FOX would seem to be a little excessive though, if that were to be the case.
 
Q2UnME said:
The ATT-Time Warner deal has hit a major snag, I do not see this one just gliding smoothly through the system.

Q2
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You do know that there's a good chance that there were nefarious motives behind the DoJ suing to block the AT&T/Time Warner merger, right?
 
Owain Taggart said:
That sounds likely, and I thought I had read (maybe it was here?) a claim that Disney would only be interested in FOX to get total control of Star Wars, to get at the distribution side of things. Making a whole go at FOX would seem to be a little excessive though, if that were to be the case.
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This was an IP grab, plain and simple. Disney has no need for the Fox production apparatus. A lot of people are going to be unemployed as a result of this.

(Edit: Okay, and I guess grabbing the Fox RSNs bolsters their planned ESPN+ streaming service.)
 
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I think there are some posters here who aren't aware of some things that have happened since the merger was announced that don't mesh with the notion of there being scrutiny applied to it.

Edit: Ninja'd without the vagueness.
 
fireproof78 said:
When they have control, that doesn't mean that they will become good. Unfortunately, if they have so many products to manage, their output may exceed their quality.

Regardless, Disney acquiring more properties is not a positive to me.
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Well for me Disney having more properties is great news. As for the other stuff, you're declaring that the sky is falling with no evidence. I haven't seen anything to say that Disney's overall quality will lower, and they certainly can only improve stuff like the X-Men and FF properties. Yeah, not every single Disney movie is great, but they average good to amazing more then any other studio. I'll take an occasional Pirates 4 if Disney in general stays good to great. I can't think of a single Disney movie in recent years that is as awful as stuff like Logan or Fant4stic. So FOX has more crap, and their crap is worse.
 
As far as the monopoly = better/worse quality, unifying the Marvel properties would be a good thing. Beyond that, though, having Disney control so much IP at once is...disturbing.

Disney swallowing up ABC, Muppets, and Pixar kind of felt reasonable but when they got Marvel and then Star Wars in rather quick succession, it just seemed unreal. Now we're really in fantasyland for how immense they're becoming.
 
While very entertaining and quite well-produced, Disney's Marvel stuff is becoming formulaic, homogenized, generic, and overly jovial, lacking gravitas and having nothing interesting or important to say. :thumbdown:

I don't want that to happen to the X-Men franchise.

Kor
 
DigificWriter said:
Where, exactly, did this 18 months figure come from? I can't find any real source for it online
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There will almost certainly be a review process by the FTC. Forbes suggested it'll take 12-18 months.

The FTC actually has Guidelines related to horizontal mergers. My thought is that Disney lawyers have certainly been reviewing this deal for potential red flags and will be prepared to defend this deal from any issues.

ETA: I hate Comicbook.com, but I'm too lazy to go down the rabbithole to figure out the original source. Bob Iger specifically commented on the regulatory issues. Talking about how many Fox IP projects will go forward under the same banner, he said:

How much we will create from that banner is still uncertain. It’s going to take a while from a regulatory perspective to continue to develop in that time. In such time as we close this deal and really work carefully at what their slate looks like going forward and how many movies it makes sense to make.”

Tiny Timby said:
This was an IP grab, plain and simple. Disney has no need for the Fox production apparatus. A lot of people are going to be unemployed as a result of this.
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The fact that they didn't take 20th Century Fox's studio lot alone should be an indication of this.
 
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kirk55555 said:
Ok this is a tangent, but I'm talking about the movies where humans, with jets and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons can't beat monkeys. In the old POTA, the humans blew themselves up, which made sense. In the new ones, the monkeys rise up against people with the capability of literally killing hundreds of thousands of apes with the push of a button. None of the modern POTA films make any damn sense. Disease or not, the surviving humans have weapons the apes just can't use, I don't care how smart they are. The apes aren't bullet proof, and at some point the humans are going to say "fuck it" and just use weapons that no one can escape (even a hiding ape is going to die to a nuke or even just unrestricted use of bombs). Except they don't, because then you only have a bad movie with James Franco, not a bad trilogy. The original POTA wasn't high art, but at least it managed to explain its world in a way that allowed me to suspend my disbelief.
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You're completely ignoring the fact that the vast majority of humanity had been wiped out by Simian Flu by the time we reach Dawn and War. As the apes society was building humanity was in utter chaos, and in the process of collapsing.
Also, the fourth movie I'm talking about is the movie where Marky Mark got back to "Earth" and saw a statue of an ape version of Abraham Lincoln.
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kirk55555 said:
Well for me Disney having more properties is great news. As for the other stuff, you're declaring that the sky is falling with no evidence. I haven't seen anything to say that Disney's overall quality will lower, and they certainly can only improve stuff like the X-Men and FF properties. Yeah, not every single Disney movie is great, but they average good to amazing more then any other studio. I'll take an occasional Pirates 4 if Disney in general stays good to great. I can't think of a single Disney movie in recent years that is as awful as stuff like Logan or Fant4stic. So FOX has more crap, and their crap is worse.
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We'll see.
 
Kor said:
While very entertaining and quite well-produced, Disney's Marvel stuff is becoming formulaic, homogenized, generic, and overly jovial, lacking gravitas and having nothing interesting or important to say. :thumbdown:

I don't want that to happen to the X-Men franchise.

Kor
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My thought exactly. I have had no desire to rewatch a Marvel movie since The Winter Soldier. After Civil War I decided to wait until they become a available on Amazon Video.
 
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