The Disney/Fox acquisition 3+ years later. Time for an actual opinion about it. (+ Update)

Hey! It's been some time since my last blog. Sorry for not being that active on here, I never had any intentions beyond the Nintendo 2022 thing I'm still making (or put on hold for a bit). But I'm making it up, after this blog, I'll be doing more smaller blogs that go into more of my opinionated stuff on movie and gaming subjects. I also have a separate blog coming up where I'm planning on doing media review and a new blog series that I'm going to do (the last couple of sentences from that Sonic Origins blog was a tease). 

 

(Hi again, so this is another update, I decided to change my one of the statements that I written since it actually gotten a bit too out of place on a blog about a acquisition, so I apologize if you had to see it (if you did).)

 

So, I'm gonna stop the talking, here's the blog of my opinion about the Disney/Fox acquisition:

Wow. 3 years since Disney decided to wake up and play Monopoly. So this is kind of a dead subject since the deal closed in 2019. 

 

If you were somewhat living under a rock for the past 5 years or so, in December 2017, Disney announced they would acquire 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion. In June 2018 Comcast offered a $65 billion bid to buy Fox, roughly $12.6 billion more than Disney's offer. So Disney went fuck it and offered Fox $71.3 billion, roughly $6.3 billion more than Comcast's offer, and Fox agreed to Disney's offer. And on March 20, 2019, Disney officially owned 21st Century Fox.

If you were one of my readers who saw my Twitter back when it was semi-decent, I hated this merger (I'll admit though, saying it caused me PTSD is stretching the gum too far even by most standards). I never really explained why I hate this merger. So, let's get through the reasons:

1: Monopolization

 

Do I really need to explain this? I will regardless, so this is pretty much most people's reasoning as to why this merger was a bad idea from the very start. And why was Disney accused of monopolization when the deal was announced? Simple, this is a horizontal acquisition as opposed to a vertical acquisition. I'll explain deeper:

A vertical acquisition is a type of acquisition where two businesses produce products at a different state. For example, Comcast buying NBCUniversal and AT&T buying Time Warner. What does this have to do with vertical acquisitions? Well, Comcast is a cable network company and NBCUniversal is a media/entertainment company. AT&T is a telephone company and Time Warner was a media/entertainment company. You see where I'm getting with this? So, that's a vertical acquisition.

A horizontal acquisition on the other hand is a type of acquisition where two businesses produce the same kind of product. This is more looked down by tons of people because not only it would the company cut down one competition from the table, it would also have more power of what's produced and have control of the market because of that. So that's why antitrust laws exist in the U.S. so that monopolization wouldn't occur (though as you all know, Disney somehow managed to get through the loops despite the backlash).

Yeah, I have the same opinion like most other people, this is a horizontal acquisition, and just creates a monopoly. And I have a good reason why, because having the same kind of product by Disney will get tiring after years, maybe you want to be more of a Universal or Paramount viewer. I mean the Sonic movie and the upcoming Mario movie are pretty much enough to make a lot of Disney viewers turn their heads to the other competitors. And you know what? That's okay, because that's normal practice everywhere.

And that's what I support. If you have something that stands out of the competition, whether it'd be something original or innovative that wasn't done before, then I'd say go for it. You'll likely not succeed the first time, but after a few times, you'll get the hang of it and you'll be able to get the audience you wanted.

Okay that went a bit sidetracked, but yeah overall, this is one reason why I hate this acquisition.

2: Quantity-Over-Quality

If monopolization wasn't a problem, this is. The amount of films that Disney puts out is suspiciously big. Hell, they produced 32 films from 2021, and 17 of them were by Fox (16 if you don't count Diary of the Wimpy Kid reboot but I'm still counting it because fuck you Disney, Fox planned it first, you didn't).

So obviously out of the 32 movies, only around 10 were average-great if you go to tons of review sites. In my personal opinion, I only found 2 movies from the Disney brand to be pretty good (Luca and Free Guy). If any of that says anything, that's not good. They're basically wasting about $15-30 billion a year for a lot of those under-performing movies that were either not advertised enough, quick cash grabs, and/or heavily controversial.

And don't get me started with the franchise milking Disney does. Even before they bought Fox, they've been going insane with their franchises. Fuck, so much so that I firmly believe the remakes Fox did prior to the buyout was to tell Disney, "Hey, we've prepared all these remakes so we guarantee you we understand your culture!"

Overall, it's a huge problem business-wise, because if they continue to waste their budget on a lot of these projects that won't get them the profit they want, then I can't see them continuing business by 2030 at the earliest.

In my opinion, Disney needs to focus more on the thing that got them where they are today, good storytelling. Now okay, the animated movies (their own animation studios, Pixar, and sometimes 20th Century Animation) do that, most of the time at least. But I'm also talking about the live-action ones. Even before the 2010s, they weren't doing a good job with the live-action films and they just turn out very bland, generic, rushed, and just don't fit as Disney movies. I'm not saying they should throw away live-action. They can still do it, but they need to give it the same recognition like their animated movies, and that's, again, good storytelling and high-quality.

So what's the point I'm making? My point is, Disney needs to lay down the smoke pipe and just focus on 2-4 films of each of their divisions/subsidiaries, so around 12-24 films a year. Even though it still sounds like it's too much, but you have to think, Disney has a lot of studios, and if they plan on acquiring more in the future, their production costs are gonna go through the roof and they could face a serious financial crisis at some point. And in my opinion, even though I barely have any knowledge on film business, they need to cut costs from the majority of their films (either cancel them or delay them indefinitely until the time is right) and if they focus on those 12-24 films and loosen their creative freedom restriction, they'd probably be surprised at how much they would earn from the box office and how much more they'd be saving when doing that.

But this is Disney we're talking about, they really don't give a fuck if the franchise is in a fatigue. They don't care, they'll drag the same dying thing in the dirt 20-30 times a year. And that smoothly leads me to my next thing:

3: More Control of Production

 

 

So think of this as a add-on to my 2nd reason. Like I said in my previous reasoning, Disney has many divisions and subsidiaries. There's Walt Disney Pictures, Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Studios. And that's just the movie production side of things, I could go on and on about the companies Disney owns. There are so many studios that Disney owns, as I said, it legit feels like a monopoly.

And because of that, they have control over about everything the studios puts out. Whether it'd be films, shows, parks, whatever, they'll overlook everything and greenlit or shoot down production they see fit. Hell, one of the two movies that I found pretty good in 2021, Free Guy, was even affected by this, and it's a part where there was unnecessary references to their other franchises, and while it was admittedly interesting and kind of funny, it did really felt like it was forced in by them rather than planned.

And it's really odd, because back then, Disney originally owned Miramax to distribute and produce more mature movies (PG-13 and R), and they didn't made them put in unnecessary things to promote their own brand. Fuck, I'd say they did a great job hiding the fact they used to own Miramax until their sell in 2010.

So why are they doing these references/promotions from their subsidiaries now rather than back then? I guess it's probably because Disney became way more mainstream compared to pre-2014. Think about it, Twitter back then was more of a place where celebrities just talked to other celebs before the youngsters of Tumblr addicts took over in 2018, the only remakes Disney did was The Jungle Book '94, 101 Dalmatians '96 and its sequel, and Alice in the Wonderland in 2010 before Maleficent released in 2014, and news media were about the fucking news (...well most of the time, but).

"Alright, well what's the problem with them overseeing production?" And you got a point, I mean you need someone looking if you're actually working or just slacking off. But this is Disney we're talking about, and this problem is: Lack of creative freedom.

This problem is what's destroying Disney's public reputation. All of those quantity of movies that I talked about could have worked, had they taken risks. And that's the problem. Disney isn't doing a lot of risks and decides to play mostly safe. And even if Disney does take a risk once in a blue moon, it's either forced, underwhelming, underutilized, and/or very cliché. There's not much of a in-between kind of.

For example, there's a Ice Age movie on Disney+ that revolves around Buck, the character that was only properly utilized in Dawn of the Dinosaurs. There's a lot of potential they could have done with the character, like an entire movie that further explores the character's backstory, kind of like Puss in Boots, it'd be cliché for sure, but it'd be interesting for continuity side of things. But, Disney didn't do that and instead only made it to further milk the franchise originally done by Fox. Doesn't help that this was meant to be a series rather than a movie and Blue Sky Studios was not involved, which explains why it turned the way it is.

Another example is Mulan, a live-action remake from 2020 that tainted Disney remakes in the public's eye. Basically, Disney and the writers decided, "You know what? Let's remove the charm of the original film and appeal to the Twitter and Chinese citizens!" So, they removed tons of shit from the original, like music numbers, characters like Mushu and Li Shang (which made a lot of people mad and boycotted the film as a result), and a few crucial parts that actually makes a good story so that they could have a much more "darker" and "appropriated" tone. Oh and they force in one-sided morals and propaganda in the film too unsurprisingly;

Now okay, I'll say this, a darker tone of a Disney remake isn't the worst idea they could come up with, hell that'd have some potential like maybe being more faithful towards the original books (which from what I heard, isn't family-friendly) and could open up to having extra scenes that maybe the classic didn't do because of deadlines or limitations. But of course for Mulan, nothing could really save it because Disney decided to credited two concentration camps in China and tried to dismiss criticism by claiming the U.S. and U.K. government didn't had an issue with them crediting them. Well it's still fucked up either way that they even thought of doing that in the first place.

Okay I've stretched this far now, but my point is, Disney's lack of creative freedom is what's making people jump out of their ship. In fact, this actually made the competition change after the Fox acquisition, like Paramount saying in 2018 that they'd be more focus on creativity and small-budgeted films so that they could stand out in the market (and to an extent they are standing out, and that's mostly because of Sega & Sonic obviously).

 

But yeah, that's another reason why the Fox acquisition sucks.

Conclusion

Well, this was long. Okay, there are a few benefits of the acquisition. For one thing since Disney+ is out, there's a lot of shows and movies that were made by Fox that's on there, basically boosting the value of the service, even if it's kinda lackluster nowadays. Also, it allowed Disney to be a tiny bit opener towards mature films. And on top of that, with Blue Sky Studios (unfortunately) shutting doors, 20th Century Animation could technically team up with Pixar, or at the very least the other animation departments Disney owns, to make animated movies, which shows real potential since it could allow them to make more mature animated movies that they might've wanted to do, but that'd be setting the bars too high.

So, my overall opinion of the Disney/Fox acquisition 3+ years later is, it's still the same as when I first talked about it. The overall nature of the buyout and the things that happen just tainted my respect for Disney as a whole at that point. Though, some say they lost respect after the Marvel acquisition, some say they lost respect after the Lucasfilm acquisition, but I think we can all agree that the Fox acquisition made tons of us realize Disney's true intentions.

So, that wraps up this pretty long blog, this is Oobi Dash, I'll see you next time.