Disney to Buy Marvel for $4 Billion
- By Lewis Wallace
- August 31, 2009 |
- 10:40 am
If approved, a $4 billion deal would make Spider-Man and Mickey Mouse corporate cousins.
The Walt Disney Co. is in the process of buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in cash and stock. The deal would give the Mouse House ownership of Marvel’s 5,000 superhero characters.
“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, Disney’s president and CEO, in a statement Monday.
The boards of the two companies have approved the deal, which must clear antitrust review and gain approval from Marvel’s shareholders before being completed. Disney would pay owners of Marvel stock $30 per share in cash plus 0.745 Disney shares for every Marvel share they own.
Based on Friday’s closing price of Disney stock, the transaction value is $50 per Marvel share, Disney said.
Marvel shares rose to $48.70 in premarket trading Monday on news of the sale, according to Reuters, while Disney shares dropped 3 percent.
If Disney doesn’t neuter Marvel’s stable of superheroes — a colorful and expanding universe with deep pulp roots and characters that have proven to be extremely popular over the years — the deal could help the comic book giant extend its recent Hollywood success and expand its overseas operations.
Visitors to Disney-owned theme parks could soon see characters like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk roaming the grounds or could find themselves soaring through the air on an Iron Man ride.
“Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses,” said Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter in the press release. “This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.” Perlmutter will continue to oversee Marvel’s operations and work to integrate the comic book characters into Disney’s business.
The deal includes Marvel Studios, the comic book giant’s increasingly successful movie production arm. After a decade of producing movies in partnership with other studios, Marvel Studios released its first independently produced film last year: Iron Man starred Robert Downey Jr. as billionaire weapons dealer Tony Stark who creates an weaponized suit of armor that makes him a one-man army.
The movie, which raised the bar for movies based on Marvel’s comic book properties, launched Hollywood’s blockbuster superhero summer of 2008.
Marvel Studios is currently working on a sequel, Iron Man 2, which the company showed off at this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego. Other Marvel Studios pictures in development include Thor and The First Avenger: Captain America, both slated for release in 2011, and The Avengers, due in 2012.
Reactions to the news lit up the tweetosphere, with some Marvel fans expressing excitement and others condemning the purchase of Marvel by the family-friendly Disney.
“A Pixar-Marvel film would blow my head clean off,” tweeted Michael Borkowski. “Please make it happen.”
Tons of Marvel-Disney crossover jokes poured forth, with fans pointing out that Donald Duck Howard the Duck might now be related.
Said K. T. Stevenson: “Disney buys Marvel. The first X-Mouse comic I see will make me hurl.”
Marvel Comics Editor in Chief Joe Quesada took to Twitter Monday morning to reassure comics fans about the deal.
“Welcome to this moment in history,” Quesada tweeted. “Everyone relax, this is incredible news and all is well in the Marvel U…. Everybody take a deep breath, all your favorite comics remain unchanged and Tom Brevoort remains grouchy.”
Quesada pointed to the creative and business success that followed Disney’s purchase of Pixar for evidence that all remains well within the House of Ideas.
“If you’re familiar with the Disney/Pixar relationship, then you’ll understand why this is a new dawn for Marvel and the comics industry,” he said.
Meanwhile, acclaimed comics writer Warren Ellis, who has worked for Marvel in the past, cracked wise about the pending deal.
“Why is everyone at Marvel making quacking noises today?” Ellis tweeted. “It’s horrible.”
Image courtesy Marvel Comics.
Time Warner Spinoff Shuffles Ranks, Disney New No. 1 (Update1)
By Andy Fixmer and Sarah Rabil
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Time Warner Inc.’s spinoff of its cable division dropped the New York-based owner of Time magazine and Warner Bros. to third place among U.S. media companies, behind Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.
Disney, based in Burbank, California, reported fiscal 2008 sales of $37.8 billion. Excluding $17.2 billion in cable revenue, Time Warner’s 2008 sales totaled $29.8 billion.
Time Warner divested the unit, the second-largest cable company in the U.S., because it no longer needed the division to guarantee distribution of its channels including HBO and CNN. With the split, which took effect yesterday, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. becomes No. 2, with $33 billion in sales.
“Investors want to buy large market names,” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, said in an interview. He rates Disney, News Corp. and Time Warner shares “market perform.” “It’s better to be Disney than a company that’s a third of the size like Viacom.”
Time Warner spokesman Ed Adler said in an interview the split reflected different strategies.
“Time Warner now is a focused content company,” said Adler. “We have the scale and know-how to make it possible for Time Warner to capitalize on emerging distribution platforms.”
Jonathan Friedland, a spokesman for Disney, already the world’s biggest theme-park operator, and News Corp. spokeswoman Teri Everett declined to comment.
Time Warner gained $1.07, or 5.9 percent, to $19.30 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares fell 39 percent last year. Disney, down 30 percent in 2008, rose 31 cents to $18.16 and News Corp. Class A shares advanced 14 cents to $6.62 and declined 56 percent last year.
The split also gives Time Warner cash to rebuild, Nathanson said. The company is still suffering from its failed merger with AOL in 2001, he said.
Time Warner named Google Inc. executive Tim Armstrong to lead AOL this month, making a spinoff of the business more likely, Nathanson said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Andy Fixmer in Los Angeles at afixmer@bloomberg.net; Sarah Rabil in New York at srabil@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: March 31, 2009 17:07 EDTObama, Spider-Man Appear In Inauguration Marvel Comic| 
WASHINGTON — Spider-Man has a new sidekick: The president-elect.
Barack Obama collected Spider-Man comics as a child, so Marvel Comics wanted to give him a "shout-out back" by featuring him in a bonus story, said Joe Quesada, Marvel's editor-in-chief.
"How great is that? The commander in chief to be is actually a nerd in chief," Quesada said. "It was really, really cool to see that we had a geek in the White House. We're all thrilled with that."
The comic starts with Spider-Man's alter-ego Peter Parker taking photographs at the inauguration, before spotting two identical Obamas.
Parker decides "the future president's gonna need Spider-Man," and springs into action, using basketball to determine the real Obama and punching out the impostor.
Obama thanks him with a fist-bump.
Marvel comics have featured most presidents, but generally in walk-on roles, Quesada said.
"I think President Nixon might have appeared on the cover, but not in a good way," he said.
Obama has said that as a child, he collected Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books. His Senate Web site used to have a photo of him posing in front of a Superman statue.
The Obama story is a bonus in Marvel Comic's Amazing Spider-Man #583, available in comic book shops nationwide on Jan. 14 for $3.99 and is expected to sell out, with half the covers devoted to Obama.
Action Alert
Eisner's Fantasyland Excuse for Censorship
5/7/04
On the television network that his company owns, Disney CEO Michael Eisner dismissed the idea that forbidding Disney subsidiary Miramax to distribute a controversial new documentary by Michael Moore was a form of censorship. "We informed both the agency that represented the film and all of our companies that we just didn't want to be in the middle of a politically-oriented film during an election year," he told ABC World News Tonight (5/5/04), referring to Moore's Fahrenheit 911, which examines the connections between the Bush family and the House of Saud that rules Saudi Arabia.
On its face, Eisner's statement will have a chilling effect. A major movie studio with an announced policy of only releasing apolitical films, in an election year or any other year, will discourage filmmakers from tackling important themes and impoverish the American political debate. (That Moore and Miramax were given advance warning of this policy hardly mitigates its censorious impact.)
But Eisner's statement cannot be taken at face value, because Disney, through its various subsidiaries, is one of the largest distributors of political, often highly partisan media content in the country-- virtually all of it right-wing. Consider:
Almost all of Disney's major talk radio stations-- WABC in New York, WMAL in D.C., WLS in Chicago, WBAP in Dallas/Ft. Worth and KSFO in San Francisco-- broadcast Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Indeed, WABC isconsidered the home station for both of these shows, which promote an unremitting Republican political agenda. (Disney's KABC in L.A. carries Hannity, but has Bill O'Reilly instead of Limbaugh.) Disney's news/talk stations are dominated by a variety of other partisan Republican hosts, both local and national, including Laura Ingraham, Larry Elder and Matt Drudge.
Disney's Family Channel carries Pat Robertson's 700 Club, which routinely equates Christianity with Republican causes. After the September 11 attacks, Robertson's guest Jerry Falwell (9/13/01) blamed the attacks on those who "make God mad": "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America." Robertson's response was, "I totally concur." It's hard to imagine that anything in Moore's film will be more controversial than that.
Disney's ABC News prominently features John Stossel, who, though not explicitly partisan, advocates for a conservative philosophy in almost all his work: "It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market," he has explained (Oregonian, 10/26/94). No journalist is allowed to advocate for a balancing point of view on ABC's news programs.
Given the considerable amount of right-wing material distributed by Disney, much of it openly promoting Republican candidates and issues, it's impossible to believe that Disney is preventing Miramax from distributing Fahrenheit 911 because, as a Disney executive told the New York Times (5/5/04), "It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle." Disney, in fact, makes a great deal of money off of highly charged partisan political battles, although it generally provides access to only one side of the war.
So what is the real reason it won't distribute Moore's movie? The explanation that Moore's agent said he was offered by Eisner-- that Disney was afraid of losing tax breaks from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush-- is more persuasive than Eisner's obviously false public rationale. But more relevant may be Disney's financial involvement with a member of the same Saudi family whose connections to the Bush dynasty are investigated by Moore. Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, a billionaire investor who is a grandson of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, became a major investor in Disney's Eurodisney theme park when it was in financial trouble, and may be asked to bail out the troubled project again.
It's not unprecedented for Disney to respond favorably to a political request from its Saudi business partner; when Disney's EPCOT Center planned to describe Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in an exhibit on Israeli culture, Al-Walid says that he had personally asked Eisner to intervene in the decision. That same week, Disney announced that the pavilion would not refer to Jerusalem as Israel's capital (BBC, 9/14/99).
Whatever the true motive of Disney's decision to reject Moore's film, it's not the one that Eisner and other company spokespersons are advancing in public. Journalists covering the issue should go beyond Disney's transparent PR stance and explore the real motivations involved.
See also: ABC/Disney
See FAIR's Archives for more on:
Disney/John Stossel
Disney/ABC Radio Networks
Censorship
CJR's guide to what the major media companies own.
Select a media company below to begin.
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- The Walt Disney Company
- 500 South Buena Vista Street
Burbank, CA 91521 - Voice (818) 560-1000
- www.disney.com
- 1901
- Walter E. Disney is born
- 1928
- Mickey Mouse is featured for the first time in the short animated film, Steamboat Willie
- 1929
- Walt Disney Productions formed
- 1937
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is released. It is Disney's first full length animated film
- 1940
- Walt Disney Productions offers stock as the company goes public to help lower debt. The company also moves its operations from Hollywood to Burbank, CA.
- 1941
- Disney animation workers go out on strike for five months. Deal to return back to work is finally brokered by federal mediators
- 1943
- The American Broadcast Company network is formed after the FCC rules that NBC must sell one of its two radio networks. The NBC Blue network is sold to Edward J. Noble for $8 million. Noble made his money as the creator of Lifesavers candy.
- 1945
- Walt's brother, Roy, becomes president of company
- 1947
- Walt Disney testifies in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
- 1951
- Leonard Goldstein and United Paramount Theaters buy ABC for $25 million
- 1953
- Buena Vista Distribution Company is formed to act as Disney film distributor
- 1954
- Disneyland, the first weekly television series from the studio debuts on ABC
- 1955
- Disneyland opens in Anaheim, CA at a cost of $17 million. The ABC television network is partial investor in Disneyland. The Mickey Mouse Club airs on ABC for the first time. Howard Hughes offers to sell Disney the RKO studio but Walt and Roy decline the deal
- 1960
- Disney buys out ABC's remaining financial interest in Disneyland
- 1966
- Walt Disney dies from lung cancer
- 1970
- Monday Night Football debuts
- 1971
- Walt Disney World opens in Orlando, FL.
- 1979
- ESPN is launched
- 1983
- Tokyo Disneyland opens. The Disney Channel makes its debut on cable television
- 1984
- Michael Eisner becomes the new CEO for Walt Disney Productions. ABC in a deal with Getty Oil acquires ESPN. ABC sells 20% of the sports cable network to Nabisco who in turn later deals the stake to Hearst
- 1986
- Company changes name from Walt Disney Productions to the Walt Disney Company. Capital Cities Communication, a large broadcasting group, acquires the ABC television network for 3.5 $billion.
- 1987
- ESPN is awarded the National Football League's first cable broadcasting deal
- 1992
- Disney is awarded a National Hockey League expansion team to be called The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim make their league debut. ESPN Radio is launched
- 1993
- Disney acquires Miramax Films
- 1995
- Disney announces its intent to purchase Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion. The deal is the largest media merger in history to the point and the second largest sum of money ever paid for a U.S. company
- 1996
- Capital Cities/ABC officially becomes part of the Disney Company. Disney.com is launched. Disney gains ownership stake in Major League Baseball's California Angels. Team later changes its name to the Anaheim Angels. Radio Disney is launched
- 1997
- Knight Ridder purchases Disney's four newspapers (Kansas City Star, Forth Worth Star-Telegram, Wilkes Barre Times Leader, Belleville News-Democrat) for $1.65 billion
- 1998
- ESPN The Magazine is launched
- 1999
- Fairchild Publications is sold to Advance Publications. The magazine chains includes such titles as W, Jane, and Women's Wear Daily
- 2000
- Robert Iger becomes president and COO
- 2001
- News Corp. sells Fox Family Worldwide to Disney. Cable channel later becomes known as ABC Family
- 2002
- ESPN and ABC announce their acquisition of the National Basketball Association's television broadcasting rights
- 2003
- Anaheim Angels sold to Phoenix businessman Arturo Moreno for just over $180 million
- 2003
- Roy Disney resigns as vice-chairman of the Walt Disney entertainment group
- 2005
- Bob Iger replaces Michael Eisner as CEO
- 2006
- Disney purchases the rights to Pixar
- 2008
- Disney buys back rights to Disney Store, which had previously been owned by The Children's Store
- Film
- Walt Disney Pictures
- Touchstone Pictures
- Hollywood Pictures
- Miramax Films
- Pixar
- Broadcast Television
- ABC Network
- Owned and Operated Television Stations
- WLS - Chicago
- WJRT - Flint
- KFSN - Fresno
- KTRK - Houston
- KABC - Los Angeles
- WABC - New York City
- WPVI - Philadelphia
- WTVD - Raleigh - Durham
- KGO - San Francisco
- WTVG - Toledo
- Cable Television
- ESPN (80%)
- ESPN2 (80%)
- ESPN Classic (80%)
- ESPNU (80%)
- ESPNEWS (80%)
- ABC Family
- Disney Channel
- Toon Disney
- SOAPnet
- Lifetime Network (partial)
- Lifetime Movie Network (partial)
- Lifetime Real Women (partial)
- A&E (partial)
- A&E International (partial)
- Jetix Europe (partial)
- Jetix Latin America
- The History Channel (partial)
- Lifetime Real Women (partial)
- Radio
- ABC Radio
- WDWD – Atlanta
- WMVP – Chicago
- WLS – Chicago
- KESN – Dallas
- KMKI – Dallas-Forth Worth
- KRDY – San Antonio
- WCOG – Greensboro, NC
- WRDZ – Indianapolis
- KABC – Los Angeles
- KLOS – Los Angeles
- KDIS – Los Angeles
- KSPN – Los Angeles
- KDIZ – Minneapolis - St. Paul
- WKSH – Milwaukee, WI
- WEVD – New York City
- KDZR – Portland, OR
- KWDZ – Salt Lake City
- KIID – Sacramento
- KMKY – Oakland
- KQAM – Wichita
- KKDZ – Seattle
- WSDZ – St. Louis
- WWMK – Cleveland
- KMIK – Phoenix
- KDDZ – Denver
- WWMI – Tampa
- KMIC – Houston
- WMYM – Miami
- WBWL – Jacksonville
- WBYU – New Orleans
- KDIS – Little Rock
- WWJZ – Philadelphia
- WWJZ – Philadelphia
- WMKI – Boston
- WDZK – Hartford
- WDDZ – Providence
- WDZY – Richmond
- WGFY – Charlotte
- WDYZ – Orlando
- WMNE – West Palm Beach
- WEAE – Pittsburgh
- WDRD – Louisville
- WDDY – Albany, NY
- KPHN – Kansas City
- WQUA – Mobile
- WBML – Jacksonville
- WFDF – Detroit
- WFRO – Fremont, OH
- WDMV – Damascus, MD
- WHKT – Norfolk Radio Disney
- ESPN Radio (syndicated programming)
- Music
- Walt Disney Records
- Hollywood Records
- Lyric Street Records
- Publishing
- Book Publishing Imprints
- Hyperion
- Miramax Books
- ESPN Books
- Theia
- ABC Daytime Press
- Hyperion eBooks
- Hyperion East
- Disney Publishing Worldwide
- Cal Publishing Inc.
- CrossGen
- Hyperion Books for Children
- Jump at the Sun
- Volo
- Michael di Caupa Books
- Disney Global Children's Books
- Disney Press
- Disney Editions
- Disney Libri
- Global Retail
- Global Continuity
- Magazine
- Automotive Industries
- Biography (with GE and Hearst)
- Discover
- Disney Adventures
- Disney Magazine
- ECN News
- ESPN Magazine (distributed by Hearst)
- Family Fun
- Institutional Investor
- JCK
- Kodin
- Top Famille - French family magazine
- US Weekly (50%)
- Video Business
- Quality
- Wondertime Magazine
- Parks and Resorts
- Walt Disney Imagineering
- Disneyland Resort
- Walt Disney World Resort
- Tokyo Disney Resort
- Disneyland Resort Paris
- Hong Kong Disneyland
- Disney Vacation Club
- Disney Cruise Line
- Other
- Disney Theatrical Productions
- Disney Live Family Entertainment
- Disney on Ice
- The Disney Store
- Club Penguins
- ESPN Zone
- Disney Toys
- Disney Apparel, Accessories and Footwear
- Disney Food, Health and Beauty
- Disney Home Furnishings and Decor
- Disney Stationery
- Disney Consumer Economics
- The Baby Einstein Company
- Muppets Holding Company
- Disney Interactive Studios
- Walt Disney Internet Group
- last updated 7/30/08
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