Disney Takeover of Marvel

Marvel's Characters are Just plain cool, but could their gritty nature be threatened?

Yes you read the title correctly, Marvel the iconic anti-hero comic book giant has been taken over by Disney, the ultimate conformist and kid-friendly corporation in the world in a 4 billion doller deal.

Like many my first reaction was one of shock. After all this deal came completly out of left field. Virtually no one had heard anything that would have lead one to believe that Disney was in the process of taking over Marvel. And like most my secondary reaction was on of disgust.

I like Disney just fine, but it is a company that caters to young suburban youth. This demographic is the opposite of what Marvel caters to. Marvel's 1000's of characters usually fall into the category of the anti-hero. Troubled heros that save the world (or not) all while dealing with various addictions or past sins. My fear is that Marvel may become so Disneyfied that it will lose its character.

My second fear is that the already shaky comic book market will become even more uncertain. Comic book sales have already fallen roughly 1/3 this year. This is after years of steadily falling market share and steadily rising costs. What Disney is really buying is the right to all the intellectual property. Although Paramount owns the rights to Iron Man, and 20th Century Fox has the Fantastic Four there are 1000's of characters yet to be pimped out. Disney wants to expand into a more adult oriented market (as they have been over the past few decades). Having a company under a different name allows Disney to keep its kid friendly image while having access and older and generally more financially flushed age bracket.

You may be asking, "Why is this important, this is a gaming blog?". Well the Marvel Universe has dozens of games attached to it. Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Marvel Ultimate Alliance just to name a few. There are so many sequels and future titles to be released Disney has bought into the video game market. With the way the entertainment industry is heading Video Games are going to be more important then the movie or TV industry. In this way Disney will have better connections with game studios and more market exposure. Whether or not Disney planned this is debatable. They have done a piss poor job of entering the video game market thus far. One would assume that the Marvel licenced video games were considered as they have become an increasingly important part of the company.

In the end I expect Disney to roughly stay true to the Marvel Universe. After all why buy the company just to tear it apart. But a little piece of Marvel has died. It will slowely be engulfed by Disney, such is the way of nearly all takeovers. Hopefully it will retain some of its character and against the norm charm, only time will tell.