The big news of the day, if not the week, is that The Walt Disney Company is set to purchase Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion, pending shareholder approval and any regulatory issues. There are a lot of questions being thrown around about what this would mean, but the initial answer tends to be that this doesn’t magically dissolve any contracts Marvel already has in place. Universal Studios will continue to have a Marvel presence at its parks. Activision Blizzard has the rights to Spider-Man and X-Men video games through 2017. Paramount will still distribute the next few Marvel films, Sony will still have the Spider-Man films and Fox isn’t giving up the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises any time soon. Of course, as contracts expire Disney will be wanting to look at those licensing agreements again and will more than likely choose to keep them in-house, but a lot of that will be some time down the road. Disney CEO Bob Iger already said that it’d be in their “best interest” to be the sole distributor of Marvel films. Paramount’s got five more releases ahead, including Iron Man 2, Thor, The First Avenger: Captain America and The Avengers.
Of course, Pixar was brought up as a possible use for Marvel properties and Bob Iger said Disney has had internal discussions about such collaborations and that John Lasseter spoke to some Marvel guys about it. Iger said “the group got pretty excited pretty fast” and that “sparks will fly.” Sounds like he wants shareholders to be excited about potential Pixar/Marvel productions. In a vacuum that seems incredibly cool, although it would mean Pixar dedicating a production cycle to a Marvel film instead of an original concept. Plus, which characters are available that you’d actually want to see a Pixar film use? Again, Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, etc. are booked at other studios and Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, etc. have their own big live-action movies, so what big guns are left? Maybe Pixar could do something with Marvel’s newly acquired Marvelman character. Anyway, if a joint effort ever occurred I’d bet on 2014 being the earliest you’d see it.
Suffice to say, there are a lot of possibilities for Disney to utilize the Marvel characters, at least in the long run.
