R.I.P. 20th Century Fox, All Hail Disney, Owners of all Media

As of 12:02 a.m. today, 20th Century Fox is no more, it’s now just a part of Disney. To most of the public, this means that the X-Men and Fantastic Four are about to take over the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Deadpool gets a fun little hat.

Feels like the first day of ‘Pool. pic.twitter.com/QVy8fCxgqr

— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) March 19, 2019

Here’s what’s really going to happen: 4,000 people are going to lose their jobs and one company now controls basically all of entertainment. And that company wants people to think if it as being “family-friendly” and basically only makes PG or PG-13 films, something they doubled down on when they sold Miramax, although they refused to let Miramax release Fahrenheit 9/11 and Dogma when they did own them, so that’s the future of the studio that now owns half of all movies; they will not release anything edgy or controversial.

For the most part, anyway. Disney recently rehired James Gunn as the director of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 and said they would continue making R-rated Deadpool movies, because given the choice between their family friendly image and making a guaranteed billion dollars, they would like the billion dollars please.

One thing to look for is an announcement in the coming days and weeks of the fate of Fox’s final X-Men film, The New Mutants. I would be shocked if this movie played in more than 6 theaters. It is a horror film with a lesbian couple in it, there is just no way Disney screens that. They have carefully cut any reference to characters not being 100% heterosexual from every Marvel movie that directors have included them in, and I’m pretty sure the only gay characters in any Marvel TV or film property is in Runaways, which they’ve basically buried on Hulu with no promotion. I saw more commercials for Cloak and Dagger. Fox actually has 12 movies scheduled to come out this year, and Disney may pull some or all of them, like the R-Rated Kingsman sequel scheduled for November.

By the way, this merger creating the largest media conglomerate in the history of the world, was basically only done so Disney could launch a streaming service with enough content to rival Netflix. The fact that Fox was squatting on the film rights to properties Disney really wanted was just sweetening the deal, they could have bought those back for way less than $70 billion.

Streaming is really a battle for the future of entertainment right now, everything revolves around streaming. There is no one on the planet who thinks that cable television works better than Netflix, aside from not asking you if you’re still watching every twenty minutes. $13 a month to just watch what you want, when you want with no commercials is much better than $200 a month to watch only what’s on and 1/3 of it is commercials. But it’s also a much more limited space, people aren’t going to pay for five or ten streaming services, most of them are going to get choked out of the market. I’m looking at you CBS All Access and DC Universe. No one loves you. Warner Brothers is actually trying to launch a second streaming service on top of DC Universe. So Disney wants to come out strong with Disney+, so much so that they’re ending the “Disney Vault” to put all their movies on it (aside from Song of the South, I’m sure) and they bought an entire other movie and TV studio to make it work.

So when there’s six corporations left and they’ve replaced governments, remember that it all started because Bob Iger didn’t think Darkwing Duck could compete with Netflix.