The Fox Joins the Kingdom of the Mouse: A New Era in Hollywood

          

          Well, it’s official. As of Wednesday March 20^th, Twentieth Century Fox and its parent company 21^st Century Fox has become part of the Walt Disney empire. Now, well-known and well-loved characters such as Homer Simpson, Stewie Griffin and John Mcclane get to share the same house with Mickey Mouse, Iron Man, Buzz Lightyear, Olaf the Snowman and Luke Skywalker. How did it come together? Let’s rewind to the past and go back, shall we?

        Back in November 2017, 21^st Century Fox was a property of Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation (which also owns the New York Post). In addition to the movie and TV studios, it owned the Fox network and its owned-and-operated stations (including WNYW-TV and WWOR-TV), FX, the family of Fox Sports channels (including 80% of the YES Network) and 73% of the National Geographic franchise. Disney, on the other hand, owned ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Freeform and 50% of the A&E and Lifetime channels. On November 6^th, Disney and Murdock were negotiating a deal for the company to purchase most of the assets of 21^st Century Fox, with the exclusion of some properties that the Murdock family can keep. But Disney wasn’t the only company trying to buy it. Comcast (which owns NBC and Universal), Verizon and Sony were the other companies trying to make a bid on Fox. Then, on December 14^th, Disney finally made its move and made a $52.4 billion deal to purchase most of 21^st Century Fox. President Trump then congratulated Murdock on the deal and thought that this was for the best because it would create more American jobs.

       Before the deal was completed, Fox decided to sell its regional sports channels to Disney so that the company can sell it to new owners. Here in New York, the Yankees (along with Amazon.com) made a deal to repurchase the 80% share of its YES Network that Fox brought in 2012. After months of getting approval from many justice officials worldwide, on March 20^th at 12:00am, Eastern Time, the deal was finally done. Disney now owns the Fox movie and TV studios and its library of movies and TV shows. Disney also gains Fox’s indie film label (Fox Searchlight), FX, 73% of National Geographic and the 30% share of Hulu that Fox owned (it makes Disney the largest owner now with 60%. Comcast owns 30% and AT&T/WarnerMedia owns 10% of the streaming service). The Murdock family gets to keep the Fox network, Fox News, WNYW-TV, WWOR-TV and the national Fox Sports channels under a new company (Fox Corporation).

     After the deal was done, Disney then fired many longtime Fox executives who worked under Murdock so that it can save $2 billion annually by 2021. In this writer’s opinion, I think that this merger is a good idea because it helps give Disney a mega-powerhouse profile and boost up its confidence for their streaming service that the company will debut later this year. The future for the new Disney/Fox empire is far from now, but this is just the beginning.