70 billion dollars and what really do they have to show for it?
The purchase gave them an insane amount of debt so they immediately laid off a lot of former fox employees and recently laid off 7000 employees to save them 5 billion.
They also haven’t done much of anything with the Fox catalog.
Most of the new 20th century films were unceremoniously slapped onto Hulu streaming.
- Hellraiser 2022
- Prey
- New Mutants
- No Exit
- Barbarian
- Boston Strangler
- Crater
And more were all put on streaming and forgotten. Some of these movies were pretty good and could have made some money in theaters. I really liked Barbarian myself and Prey got a ton of praise.
What exactly did they get that was worth 70 billion? Avatar? The Simpsons? They could have just licensed those for Disney+ and saved a ton of money. Most of Fox’s properties don’t fit Disney. What are they even going to do with Alien, Predator, and Planet of the Apes? If Prey is any indication they aren’t interested in putting them in theaters.
Before someone says X-Men what the hell have they even done with them? Some lame cameos. I’ll never forgive them for the quicksilver gag in Wandavision. They got beat bad by Fox in the who has the cooler quicksilver so they make him a dick joke. Great.
They aren’t going to do anything with the X-Men anytime soon. The 3rd Deadpool movie seems to be the only thing even cooking and that seems to be more because Ryan Reynolds is pushing it. If you’re an X-Men fan you must be disappointed. Remember when we had an X-Men movie about every year? Say goodbye to those and Alien, Predator, Planet of the Apes.
FX seems to be doing alright but all to adult for Disney so to Hulu it goes. Why did they make a big deal out of Disney+ anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one app? Put it all on Hulu. Why are their two apps with very different interfaces for one company?
Now that Disney is losing money in streaming and with recent flops I think this deal needs to be scrutinized more. Blame Capitalism or streaming mania but I have to say even from a business standpoint it makes no sense at all.
What do you think? Was this the beginning of the end for Disney’s box office dominance? A bad play to kill Netflix? Or is Disney planning something that will take years to bear fruit?
I think that the fox purchase was a long-term play as part of its streaming strategy. It gave them access to a bigger catalogue of movies and shows and kept another competitor from releasing another streaming platform. It also gave them a majority stake in Hulu that they didn’t have before.
They specifically let the live tv content such as Fox News, the fox affiliates, and fox sports and the regional sports networks out of the deal because they weren’t interested in non-ondemand content
We won’t truly know if the fox purchase was a waste of money until we see if the Disney streaming experiment was a failure or not. If it survives the price hikes without losing to many subscribers then it probably won’t be
Do you need access to a bigger catalog if all the streamers are just putting content in the vault to save on residual payments?
Even if it’s in the vault, it’s content that fox isn’t licensing out to competitors that they may have if they were an independent entity
I think Disney Plus is in a lot of trouble. It’s costing Disney a lot of money and hurting their cable channels and box office returns. I wouldn’t call it a failure yet but it’s far from a success.
Not to mention that, despite a strong start with Mandalorian, Loki, Wandavision, etc., so many of the Disney+ originals lately have been not great. It’s really no different from Netflix.
Having the ability to do merchandising with Family Guy and The Simpsons in addition to the catalog offerings is the obvious win. There’s so much stupid branded shit. Fox was always the best about merchandising because they got their lunch stolen by George Lucas on Star Wars.