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What doesn't Disney own?

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    What doesn't Disney own?

    Prompted by the news that Disney is shutting down the studio that made the Ice Age films. Films I have strong concerns about the accuracy of, but that's a different thread. Anyway, Disney, they seem to own all pop culture, or at least the most visible pop culture.

    ​​​​​​IS it just the visibility? I'm sure they don't have a monopoly on big blockbuster films but it sometimes feels like they do.

    #2
    Well they've got Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar, so it must be the majority of the recent "blockbuster" market. Bond, Mission Impossible and the Fast and Furious ones maybe (as non-Disney ones that gross that high)?

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      #3
      According to this, in terms of size Comcast is bigger:

      https://www.investopedia.com/article...-cmcsa-cbs.asp

      Wikipedia says:

      Comcast owns and operates the Xfinity residential cable communications subsidiary, Comcast Business, a commercial services provider, Xfinity Mobile, an MVNO of Verizon, over-the-air national broadcast network channels (NBC, Telemundo, TeleXitos, and Cozi TV), multiple cable-only channels (including MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Syfy, NBCSN, Oxygen, Bravo, and E!, among others), the film studio Universal Pictures, the VOD streaming service Peacock, animation studios (DreamWorks Animation, Illumination, Universal Animation Studios) and Universal Parks & Resorts. It also has significant holdings in digital distribution, such as thePlatform, which it acquired in 2006. Since October 2018, it is also the parent company of mass media pan-European company Sky Group, making it the biggest media company with more than 53 million subscribers in the U.S. and Europe.
      In terms of media companies, though, even Comcast isn't the biggest. That's now Alphabet, which owns Google. YouTube's advertising revenues alone were only $4bn shy of the whole of Comcast's in 2019 ($15bn vs $19bn). Netflix's annual revenue is $25bn, but that's a completely different model. They currently have licensing deals with a ton of companies.

      I suspect I might be of a weird age when it comes to Disney. When I was very little there weren't hardly any video players, so it was TV only in our house, and it didn't hardly figure in my childhood at all. I loved (and still love) Hanna Barbera and Warner Bros. Still do. I still don't really understand what the conceit of Mickey Mouse is.

      I've wondered whether it's related to this, in any way, in terms of being an age thing:

      https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/exp...e-70s-and-80s/

      But the bottom line is that it was just... absent from my life. To this day, I've only seen a couple of its most famous films, and I don't particularly have much inclination to change that. So I think that I've tended to overlook just how motherfucking massive they are.

      I was persuaded to get Disney Plus by them announcing that they are releasing all five series of The Muppet Show onto it (it's in a couple of weeks, I think). I haven't fully explored it yet, but it's got Disney (obvs), Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, and Nat Geo. There's stuff on it my kids like, and stuff on it that I like. But Disney as A Thing isn't woven into my DNA in that way that happens to things that you carry over from childhood. Not in the same way as, say, The Pink Panther or Wile E Coyote, at least.

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        #4
        I don't get why the haven't used the ownership of Fox studios to put some non kids films up on Disney Plus that don't involve Star Wars or spandex pish. They have the rights to a hell of a back catalogue now.

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          #5
          They are doing that next month, the new "Star" strand

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            #6
            This has got me wondering whether they'd ever buy pornhub or some equivalent.
            The crossover programs would be the final nail in humanity's coffin.

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              #7
              I'll leave you all to think up potential crossover shows.

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                #8
                Originally posted by Mr Delicieux View Post
                I'll leave you all to think up potential crossover shows.
                Don't have to, they already exist. Rule 34 and all that.

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                  #9

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                    #10
                    That was before Comcast took Sky off their hands apparently.

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                      #11
                      It is very difficult to do a graphic that complicated that remains completely accurate given the time needed to complete it.

                      Other featured lines they have since divested include Endemol and the Fox Sports Networks.

                      And there are almost certainly things that they have acquired since it was done.

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                        #12
                        Who have they sold Fox Sports to, ursus? Down here it's very much a Disney product. Since the middle of last year they've been crossing over commentary teams and pundits (and broadcasting rights for the Libertadores) with ESPN to a huge extent, although personally I get the impression they're planning to kill the brand off and just turn the current Fox Sports channels into ESPN 4, 5 and 6 in the not-too-distant future.

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                          #13
                          Sinclair (a Trumpy owner of local television stations)

                          https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/sin...ey-1203312211/

                          Sinclair have since rebranded them as Bally in a naming rights deal with the casino operator

                          Note that these are the regional sports networks, not the national network that broadcasts the NFL and other big time sports

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by My Name Is Ian View Post
                            I suspect I might be of a weird age when it comes to Disney. When I was very little there weren't hardly any video players, so it was TV only in our house, and it didn't hardly figure in my childhood at all. I loved (and still love) Hanna Barbera and Warner Bros. Still do. I still don't really understand what the conceit of Mickey Mouse is.
                            I hear you. For me Fleischer Studios still represent the summit of US movie animation. Betty Boop, Popeye, their Cinderella and Snow White — though shorter — knock the Disney versions out of the park. They also did the earliest (I think) animated Superman. Thing is Walt wasn't an especially good animator, artist or story-teller. Instead he turned out to be a brilliant producer and businessman, and won the game that way. It's a knack. You have make product for ten-year-olds and run the business like the most bloodthirsty alligator in the swamp.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                              Sinclair (a Trumpy owner of local television stations)

                              https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/sin...ey-1203312211/

                              Sinclair have since rebranded them as Bally in a naming rights deal with the casino operator

                              Note that these are the regional sports networks, not the national network that broadcasts the NFL and other big time sports
                              I didn't know that. That's a real shame for those networks. Sinclair is vile. Then again, so is News Corp. The rump Fox still owns FS1 and FS2 and big parts of the B1G Network and Pac12 Networks, I guess. Fox's whole production style and the relative quality of its announcers makes ESPN look like Masterpiece Theatre by comparison.

                              However, some of what used to be Fox Regional networks are now somehow part of the ATT/Warner Extended Universe in a way I don't understand. It's had six or seven different names since starting as just the Pirates Cable Network in the 80s. And Comcast is now involved somehow too.

                              According to Wiki:
                              In July 2019, it was reported that AT&T was looking to sell AT&T SportsNet to reduce debt related to its acquisition of Time Warner as well as rolling out 5G on its cell phone networks. Following Sinclair's closure of its purchase of the Fox Sports Networks, it was reported that Sinclair and Comcast (the latter of which owns NBC Sports Regional Networks) could purchase AT&T Sports Networks. Such deals could reunite AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh with its former Fox Sports Network siblings through Sinclair or reunite it with TCI successor Comcast; the former would also make it a sister network to WPGH-TV/WPNT while the latter would make it a partial sister network with the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel co-owned between Comcast and WPXI.[16][17][18]

                              Comcast, if nothing else, has a real connection to Pennsylvania. It's a major employer in Philadelphia. So that's something.

                              I'm glad I just don't have cable. I actually don't watch a lot of sports anymore. I just watch the highlights. I can't stand the commercials any more. Even for Penn State sports, if I can't be present at the event, I don't really want to sit through it on TV.

                              It's odd in that I grew up on TV where you had to sit through commercials and had to watch something when it was on or you'd miss it. I've wasted years of my life flipping channels just to turn my brain off. All of that trained me to tolerate constant blather and commercials, but just five years of enjoying streaming has undone 40+ years that conditioning.



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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post

                                I hear you. For me Fleischer Studios still represent the summit of US movie animation. Betty Boop, Popeye, their Cinderella and Snow White — though shorter — knock the Disney versions out of the park. They also did the earliest (I think) animated Superman. Thing is Walt wasn't an especially good animator, artist or story-teller. Instead he turned out to be a brilliant producer and businessman, and won the game that way. It's a knack. You have make product for ten-year-olds and run the business like the most bloodthirsty alligator in the swamp.
                                The Fleischer Superman stuff is cool. I've seen those. Popeye and Betty Boop don't seem to have lasted in the popular imagination past the 80s for some reason. I guess they raise some questions about gender stereotypes.

                                I disagree that Walt wasn't a good animator, artist or storyteller. Maybe not so much him personally, but the guys he put together were great at doing certain kinds of characters and certain kinds of stories that obviously resonated with audiences and they advanced the technology a bit in their time. In that way, he was more of a Steve Jobs-type figure rather than a great artist per se.

                                But I'm biased because I'm related to one of them. And I grew up at a time when we couldn't see those films all the time, so when we did - either because they were on TV or it was rereleased to a theater - it was very special. I think Cinderella was the first film I saw in a theater. They were a lot better than any of the animation we saw on TV, save for the classic Warner Brothers stuff, of course. But those were almost a completely different medium. Much more adult, so I didn't compare them.

                                I also believe that a lot of the stuff that came out in that "lost period" between Walt's death and the resurgence in the VHS era is underrated - I mean, the mid 60s through the late 80s. It certainly looks better than the animation that was on Saturday morning cartoons in those days, for example. Disney + has a documentary on all of that which is a lot more self-critical than you might expect. The Sword and the Stone looks good, as does the big flop The Black Cauldron, for example.

                                Really, growing up, almost all animation I could see looked like it was 10 frames a second and pretty shitty, so anything that looked like it was done properly was magical to me, even all of that Ralph Bakshi rotoscope stuff that now looks a bit crap, to be honest.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post

                                  The Fleischer Superman stuff is cool. I've seen those. Popeye and Betty Boop don't seem to have lasted in the popular imagination past the 80s for some reason. I guess they raise some questions about gender stereotypes.
                                  Betty has lasted in art programs to this day. Max Fleischer's animated inking was, and remains, second to none. The Fleischer brothers began producing before children were defined as the primary audience for animated cartoons. Betty was cleaned-up up in the thirties by the Hays office. Longer skirt, no more plunging necklines etc.

                                  Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                  I disagree that Walt wasn't a good animator, artist or storyteller. Maybe not so much him personally, but the guys he put together were great at doing certain kinds of characters and certain kinds of stories that obviously resonated with audiences and they advanced the technology a bit in their time. In that way, he was more of a Steve Jobs-type figure rather than a great artist per se.
                                  I don't disagree. He hired excellent people and, technically, moved animation forward. But in doing so pigeon-holed the form aesthetically. By the 50s More interesting work was being done almost everywhere else, Eastern Europe, the NFB here in Canada, and so on. They didn't have the financial wherewithal that Disney had so distribution was necessarily limited.

                                  Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                  I grew up at a time when we couldn't see those films all the time, so when we did - either because they were on TV or it was rereleased to a theater - it was very special. I think Cinderella was the first film I saw in a theater. .
                                  Interesting. My first memory of being in a cinema — a news cinema in Sheffield I think — was traumatic, I was carried out screaming by my mother. The big dark room, with big coloured shapes on the wall, and loud screechy voices was just too much. I'm pretty sure it was a Mickey Mouse short.

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                                    #18
                                    I don't disagree. He hired excellent people and, technically, moved animation forward. But in doing so pigeon-holed the form aesthetically. By the 50s More interesting work was being done almost everywhere else, Eastern Europe, the NFB here in Canada, and so on. They didn't have the financial wherewithal that Disney had so distribution was necessarily limited.
                                    The same thing happened with US comic books. Marvel and DC were doing very well with one very specific kind of story - superheroes - for one very specific audience - adolescent boys. But I don't think they really aspired to be the only kind of comic book available (indeed, they also once made war, horror, romance, fantasy, etc). But the censors and usual band of pearl-clutching morality police came steaming in and told them that since kids were reading a lot of them, that the entire artform must be, by definition, only for kids and therefore they had to submit to a restrictive code. DC and Marvel agreed to go along with that to save their business, and just focused on superheroes. It worked for them, but it pretty much killed US comics as a form of literature available to a broad audience.

                                    By the time the direct distribution network created a market for non-Code approved comics (late 70s/80s), the public's idea of what comics were was already set in stone. So everyone trying to do non-kid-targeted and/or non-superhero graphic novels or comics were fighting an uphill battle, not only in the culture at large, but even for shelf space in those comic shops. That inertia still hinders the form, despite three decades of magazine stories with headlines like "BIF! POW! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" - with the usual list of Watchmen, Maus, assorted French and Japanese stuff, etc. Will Eisner, for example, should be extremely famous. He is not.

                                    I think Fritz the Cat remains the only "Rated X" movie I've ever seen. Because I think that formal rating was retired in favor of "NC-17" sometime in the 90s. And it was clearly only Rated X because it was an animated film made in the 1970s (or maybe it was the early 80s) and they had to make it clear that it wasn't for kids. Otherwise, it would have been R. Today, it might be PG-13 or just on HBO after 9 pm. Heavy Metal was the same way. I'd only heard of its existence as a kid. I finally saw it in college. It's no better or worse than Game of Thrones.

                                    But despite all of the stuff on Adult Swim and Comedy Central being clearly labeled, this idea that cartoons are kids stuff persists. I recall going to see the South Park movie and was a bit aghast at how many parents had brought small kids to see it.


                                    In college, I'd always go to the DOG Street theater in Williamsburg (VA, that is) whenever they had an "animation festival" on. They had a few Canadian ones. As you said, the art was supported by the NFB, so lots of it was very "Canada-oriented" like the classic "The Cat Came Back" or that one about the first guy in Canada to make a working airplane. Lots of fantastic stuff. And there were other ones that had all kinds of strange and different international content. But in the pre-youtube days that was the only way to see that kind of thing in the US except maybe PBS would randomly have something like that and then MTV's Liquid Television had some cool stuff in the early 90s. It made me wish I could be an animator. But alas. I have no talent.

                                    I suspect now that most of the people doing animation grew up in that same void of watching tremendous stuff from the 1930s or 40s and then catching a glimpse of something remarkable from abroad in some arthouse place and wondering why the animation on US TV was so crappy.

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                                      #19
                                      Interesting. My first memory of being in a cinema — a news cinema in Sheffield I think — was traumatic, I was carried out screaming by my mother. The big dark room, with big coloured shapes on the wall, and loud screechy voices was just too much. I'm pretty sure it was a Mickey Mouse short.
                                      I have no memory of ever being afraid in a movie theater except during Petes Dragon because the bad guys were going to kidnap the protagonists. The cinema experience itself never bothered me, which is weird because it seems like it would traumatize any small child.

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                                        #20
                                        HP, I sort of got the sense that "graphic novel culture" was taking off in the US only to be crushed by the film studios going wall to wall superhero and anime becoming very popular.

                                        Do you think that there is some truth to that? You pay more attention to such things than I do.

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post

                                          I have no memory of ever being afraid in a movie theater except during Petes Dragon because the bad guys were going to kidnap the protagonists. The cinema experience itself never bothered me, which is weird because it seems like it would traumatize any small child.
                                          I was very young, two or three years old perhaps. It never happened again, but I've never forgotten it either.

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                                            #22
                                            ursus arctos

                                            I don't know if it got crushed by all that. It felt like that 20 years ago, but I'm not sure what's really going on now because I'm not sure what's going on with book retail.

                                            I know that 20 years ago, the complaint among the fans of all kinds of comics and graphic novels was that Barnes & Noble and Borders put all the graphic novels next to the D&D books and Sudoku puzzles and mostly just had Marvel and DC stuff plus a shit-ton of Manga, which seemed to mostly do well with a certain kind of middle-school girl.

                                            Most comics shops were/are dominated by Marvel and DC and games from Wizards of the Coast (which I think belongs to Hasbro now) as well as the assorted tat - collectibles, posters, trading cards, etc.*

                                            I recall that time I was in Nice about 10 years ago, I thought it was cool that bookstores - or at least the big one I visited - had a lot of graphic novels and comics of all kinds and not shoved in the back or labeled for kids. That was what so many US aficionados and publishers wanted to see happen in US.

                                            But then I can't imagine any publishers of anything printed on paper are particularly concerned at all with where their stuff is displayed in Borders (RIP) or Barnes & Noble/Starbucks. Are they? If they are, they're probably focusing on the few types of books that still sell well there. I have no idea what those might be, but I don't think they're anything largely aimed at people under 35 and/or fairly niche audience.**

                                            It's all about Amazon and selling the e-versions, isn't it?

                                            That's a double-edged sword for any publisher, I suspect. On the one hand, anyone can easily find your stuff and get it quickly and they can create email lists and what not to market their publications. They aren't competing with DC or Marvel for shelf space because there is no more "shelf." Everything is available to everyone instantly if they just know how to google it.

                                            On the other hand, as with any kind of book, lot of people who are into this or that graphic novel or artist probably only discovered it because an actual human being in a book shop (or comic shop - either way, it probably had a cat) recommended it to them. And there are fewer of those places around. Online communities can make up for some of that, but online engagement mostly seems about reinforcing people's tastes rather than broadening it, unfortunately.

                                            It's the same as it is with indy movies and the loss of video stories, except there are literally almost no video stores left in the western world while there still are a few physical book shops and/or comic shops around, so that's a plus, I guess.

                                            But Oni Press, Fantagraphics, Dark Horse, Image, Drawn & Quarterly, etc - all the so-called "independent" comics publishers I bought from when I was more into it 20 years ago - are still in business doing stuff that is either totally non-superhero and/or superhero-adjacent genres - scifi, fantasy, horror, crime noir, etc.*** (DC used to have Vertigo as a separate imprint, but has now subsumed that into DC somehow.)

                                            So it's still a vibrant art form and probably going to only get better.

                                            But like with all kinds of art, it's easier than it ever was to make a thing - book, film, recording, game, etc. It's harder than ever to get paid for it.

                                            So, to get back to the original question. I don't really know, but my understanding is that graphic novels are a very healthy artform in the US, but maybe not an especially lucrative line of publishing. If, indeed, any line of publishing can be described as "lucrative" these days.






                                            *Indeed, those shops and events like Comicon are more about selling everything and anything to the sort of person who likes the kinds of stories that were once only in comics but are now in all parts of pop culture - that is now defined pretty broadly across a number of genres - but those spaces definitely do not have much at all to do with comics (what Eisner insisted on calling "sequential art") as a particular way of telling a story. I happen to like both of comics as an art and the kinds of genres that are usually associated with comics. But a whole lot of people are really only into one or the other and they don't seem to like each other very much. Then again, I haven't been on an online comics forum in many years because of the petty bickering between and among those camps. Maybe it's different now. There was a time, for example, when the anti-superhero snobs confidently predicted that superhero films would all fail so badly that they'd eventually bring DC and Marvel down completely.

                                            ** And even the so-called "mainstream" Marvel and DC titles are a pretty niche audience. Last I checked, even the most popular titles were doing like 150,000 a month. That's peanuts compared to what they sold in the 50s - let alone the readership that newspaper comic strips once had - and so it's hardly making a dent in the cultural at large. I'm sure sales of Marvel comics got a bump from the success of the Avengers, etc, but it's still pretty niche. The last Avengers film made nearly $3 billion with a B worldwide. According to some reliable analyst reports I found, in 2019 total sales of all comics and graphic novels for the whole year was $1.2bn and that was the first time it had ever topped a billion dollars. So it's doing fairly well, but I suspect WB and Disney see the comics mainly as a giant writers room to create ideas they can turn into TV and movies. If it keeps the "base" happy and doesn't lose money, all the better.

                                            *** And the movies have helped those non-superhero comics too. A lot of people equate "comic book" movies with superhero films, especially DC/Marvel ones, but there are lot of films and TV shows - both good and bad - that are based on graphic novels without superheroes. A lot of them are superhero-adjacent - Scott Pilgrim, Atomic Blonde or Snowpiercer for example, but then there's stuff like Blue is the Warmest Color, Persepolis, Ghost World and A History of Violence that don't fit that description. A lot of them aren't nearly as good as the source material - Whiteout was a huge letdown, for example - but some are and have helped draw positive attention to the artform.
                                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 16-02-2021, 03:40.

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                                              #23
                                              My Name Is Ian’s point about Disney totally resonates with me. I was of an age where there just wasn’t any Disney availability - let alone ubiquity - when I was growing up. I might have seen the Robin Hoody one, and I think a friend’s mum took a group of us to see Dumbo at the cinema when I was about 6, but that is the sum total of all my Disney experiences. About 4 hours in my first 12 years. So when they appeared as cultural references I just didn’t really know what the deal was or why I should care, whether it was seven dwarfs or Pluto and Donald. In fact, I really never understood Donald Duck - Loony Tunes, WB, Hanna Barbera and so on, Tex Avery, Carl Stalling and Mel Blanc, they were kings of cartoons in late 70s early 80s Britain, so our duck was Daffy. And Daffy was, on occasion, actually funny. While Donald really never was. So when Donald showed up I had no idea what the point of him was.

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                                                #24
                                                That's a great post, HP

                                                Thank you

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                                                  #25
                                                  For USians of my generation (and those up to 20 or so years younger), Disney was the theme parks and the weekly prime time show on NBC. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were also second division players in our cartoon universe and it was only much later that it became the blockbuster film/Disney Store/Disney Channel behemoth that it is now

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