Disney Acquiring Marvel

31 Aug 2009 at 17:16:29 by Tim McDonald

Disney has announced that it is set to acquire Marvel Entertainment.

The news comes today that Disney will gain ownership of the company, as well as all of its characters - which number over 5,000 and include luminaries such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, and (obviously) far, far more.

Both Marvel and Disney boards have approved the acquisition and the deal sounds alright for Marvel shareholders, who will receive an estimated $30 USD and 0.745 Disney shares for every share in Marvel they have. While the deal has been approved by the boards, it still has to clear the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act in addition to a few other hurdles and committees.

As is the norm with this situation, spokespeople for each company seem ecstatic with the deal. Marvel's CEO Ike Perlmutter has stated "Disney is the perfect home for Marvel's fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses," and that this is an "unparallelled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney's tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world."

"This transaction combines Marvel's strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters [...] with Disney's creative skills, unparallelled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories," said Robert A. Iger, the president and CEO of The Walt Disney Company.

So, yes, everyone's happy.

As for the impact this is likely to have on games, Kotaku has noted that Disney spokesmen have told investors that "[Marvel] have some smart licensing agreements with some of the best video game manufacturers in the business. While we have been steadily moving in the direction of video game integration, we don't rule out the blend of licensing and self-produced and distributed video games." That's courtesy of Disney's senior VP of investor relations, Lowell Singer, who added "As these licensing deals expire we have the luxury of considering what's best for the company and the products."

Which leads us to wonder what we'll see. At present, Marvel has deals with Activision (think Ultimate Alliance and Wolverine), Sega (think Iron Man and then forget about it), Gazillion (Marvel Universe and Marvel Super Hero Squad MMOs) and THQ (games for kids based around Marvel Super Hero Squad), and potentially a few others.

We note that Disney does have at least one big property that includes crossover titles - Kingdom Hearts. While that's a mix of Square-Enix and Disney characters, we'd love to see a Marvel World in there sometime. Sora, Spider-Man, and Goofy fighting off Doctor Octopus? Yes please.

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