10 Reasons Why Disney's Fox Takeover Is Terrifying

In a deal that pretty much sums up the general mood of 2017, Disney now owns lots of Fox in a buyout valued at $52.4 billion, which has cost Disney 25% of the company in shares. The deal hasn’t completely gone through yet, and Disney will be on the hook for a $2.5 billion break-up fee if it fails, but for all intents and purposes, the game has ended, the book is written and the song is sung.

This was always going to end badly since the other company in the running was Comcast - the owner of Universal - so the only way out was Rupert Murdoch not selling up at all.

Disney might be the lesser of two evils considering that Comcast is already worth $180 billion, but the end result of Disney closing the deal is that both consumers and Disney’s competitors are absolutely screwed, and that we’re living in a world where the company that gave you Mickey Mouse now provides broadband across Europe.

On the bright side, we’re more likely to get a Blu-Ray release for the unaltered Star Wars trilogy since Fox owns the distribution rights to A New Hope in perpetuity. But obvious matte paintings and dodgy compositing in 4K aren’t going to be enough to take the sting of what this deal means in the grand scheme of things…

Remember the days when you could go to the cinema and see more than one film that was a completely original work? The descent of cinema into relying on movies based on something that already exists (be it other movies, books, or real events) started before Disney dived headfirst into it by buying Marvel, but it took to it like a (Donald) duck to water, and now it’s getting boring.

The current franchise war is nothing new, but Disney are almost certainly about to step things up a gear since the Fox properties cost a quarter of the parent company, and Disney absolutely won't be resting on their laurels.

Anything remotely profitable will be remade, rebooted, and refreshed, and the already crowded market will be filled out with more and more films and TV shows that we’ve seen before. Especially since other companies will follow Disney’s lead to keep up their market share.

And, to be fair, on the whole, Disney does remakes and revivals pretty well, but you can only push a person’s nostalgia buttons so much before they get tired of it all. Something made clear by the fact that the nostalgia boom is now moving on to targeting people in their early twenties, which means that we'll probably be seeing a High School Musical reboot by the end of the decade.