Disney buys Marvel!

In a truly surprising Monday morning development, The Walt Disney Company announced that it has purchased Marvel Entertainment for the whopping price of $4 billion. According to the press release, “Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its more than 5,000 Marvel characters.” Robert Iger, President of Disney said the deal 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.”

This obviously has a big impact on the future of the Marvel characters. As of now Marvel partners with Universal Studios and their “Islands of Adventure” including rides based on Spider-Man and Hulk. And obviously Marvel has a number of movies in development at studios other than Disney. I don’t believe we’ll see any big impact on either in the near future but what it means further down the line remains to be seen.

This news is still developing so as we learn more (and what it means to the future of Marvel), we’ll update this story accordingly. For now, if you’re interested, you can read the full press release here.

UPDATE – On the shareholder conference call, Disney said that all current and future film deals that were negotiated by Marvel will stay in place. They feel those deals were well developed and Disney has no intentions of trying to reclaim any of those properties for their film unit. For the time being. They do believe that it is “in our best interest if over time we ended up as the sole distributor of these theatrical release films.”

UPDATE 2 – When asked about the possibility of a Marvel/Pixar team up, it was revealed that John Lasseter met with the key creative staff at Marvel last week and everyone got “pretty excited very fast.” They said there is a “definite opportunity” for that kind of collaboration and that “exciting products” will come from that partnership.