Disney Buys Marvel Comics

Big news today, the Walt Disney Company is going to purchase Marvel Entertainment Inc. for approximatly $4 billion dollars for its 5000 characters. These characters do include Spiderman, Iron Man and the X-Men. If you do the math that is about $800,000 per character. That’s a lot of moolah. In my talks today with many people I was shocked to hear the majority say that they are saddened by this news. I think that most people fell that this is the beginning of the end for Marvel movies as we know. I don’t believe so.

With the news of this new aquisition many people seem to be a bit apprehensive. I can see why they would feel this way because everyone views Disney as a “kids” company, but you have to remember that Disney also owns Buena Vista, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax Pictures plus many others and those companies put out quality movies that are not just kid oriented. Don’t get me wrong this news caught me off guard this morning when I read it on yahoo.com and I was a little speechless. But this isn’t the first time a comic book company has been bought by a major studio as DC Comics is owned by Warner Bros now part of Time Warner Inc and that marriage has been pretty beneficial for both parties. It’s funny because I always thought that this could happen because DC is owned by Warner Bros.

For those wondering about the future of films such as Iron Man, which is distributed by Paramount Pictures, it would appear that they will get to keep on track for their release of Iron Man 2 along with the other five films that they are supposed to do. Paramount expects to continue work on it’s projects and work closely with Marvel and Disney. This could put more money in to future projects that Marvel may produce. Having a power house like Disney may make what we enjoy about Marvel films even better.

Personally, I like the idea that maybe there could be a Marvel/ Pixar release in the future. Marvel has been doing straight to DVD animated films for a few years now, but it would be great to have Pixar’s animated guru’s take a shot at some comic properties. There are just some stories that can’t be told live action, but an animated route could be the way to go.

I’m just a curious as anyone about this purchase and unfortunately, we will just have to wait and see.

What do you think? Scared? Happy? Let us know.