Underseer
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ComicBook.com article: http://comicbook.com/movies/2018/06/20/fox-accepts-disney-increased-bid/
WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fox-disney-announce-new-deal-1529496937
Video (ComicBookCast on YouTube):
This just means that FOX stockholders accepted Disney's new offer. The federal government could still theoretically throw this deal out, and government approval will take around 2 years.
So for those of us anxious to see what the MCU would do with some of their most popular characters, we still have to wait 2 years before they start making any movies.
Even though there are aspects of this deal that have me slobbering, there's lots of downsides.
Trust/Antitrust
This means there will be fewer corporations making major motion pictures. Less competition is good for Disney stockholders, but less competition is ultimately bad for the consumer. This leads to the next problem:
FOX Was Starting To Get Superhero Movies Right
Disney has made it clear that they are all about big tentpole all the time. They're not interested in making smaller budget movies that take more risks, and I think that's a mistake.
A great example of this is the "Star Wars Story" movies (Rogue One, Solo). I really think both of those movies should have been medium budget movies that took more risks. They are my least favorite of the modern incarnation of Star Wars movies, and I think they've suffered from Disney's "everything has to be a blockbuster" approach to making movies. That might be fine for MCU movies, and I like the results with the "main" Star Wars movies (episodes 7 & 8), but I think Rogue One and Solo suffered from this.
By contrast, FOX was starting to figure out that not every superhero story has to be a big budget blockbuster, and was starting to make really good lower budget movies that took bigger risks (Deadpool, Logan, and the upcoming New Mutants).
Granted, FOX has produced quite a few duds in blockbuster X-Men movies. X2 took one of the best X-Men stories (God Loves, Man Kills), and stripped out pretty much everything that made that story interesting and relevant. With all the homosexual metaphors added by Bryan Singer, the criticism of religion inherent in the story would have been even more topical and relevant. Unfortunately, Marvel comics was brave enough to criticize religion for its role in Nazi Germany, pre-Civil War America, and in post-Civil War American racism back in the 1980s, but two decades later FOX was too chickenshit to risk criticizing religion even a tiny bit, and X2 really suffered from that decision.
X3 was an even bigger disaster, and X-Men: Apocalypse was forgettable.
But still, it looked like FOX was moving in the right direction with those smaller budget movies, and I was actually looking forward to seeing how the experiments from those smaller movies affected FOX's next big budget movie. Now we will never see that.
With Disney's obsession with blockbusters, we're just not going to see any more highly experimental superhero movies like we were starting to get from FOX, and that makes me sad.
Now for the good stuff:
A Fantastic Four that doesn't suck big, sweaty donkey balls
FOX failed miserably with the Fantastic Four movies, even after Pixar showed exactly what a Fantastic Four movie should be like. Not only did they screw up the titular heroes, but they royally botched one of the most iconic comic book supervillains of all time: Dr. Doom.
How can you screw that up. It's a pretty simple outline for a villain: he's yet another would-be conqueror, but the twist is, if you let him take over, he really would eliminate all crime and all poverty, but at the expense of all freedom.
This opens up a ton of stories
Black Panther turned out to be popular, didn't he? Well, now he can marry Ororo (Storm) from the X-Men, just like in the comics. Once he does that, that means we get that ugly breakup with Nakia that results in Nakia becoming a full-on supervillain. I suspect Lupita Nyongo is going to be really interesting as a villain.
Of course, the famously xenophobic Wakandans will reject Ororo as a queen, leading to a divorce that neither spouse really wants. That should be deliciously tragic. With or without the divorce, T'Challa becomes the most important human ally to the mutant cause, even more important than Xavier's ex-girlfriends combined (hey, why didn't FOX explore that? Didn't the concept of allies in social justice movements warrant a metaphor in their X-Men movies?).
The most delicious thing is that we can now have the Wakandan-Latverian war and watch young Shuri make Dr. Doom bow in submission. Tell me you wouldn't enjoy that. Did I mention that T'Challa once hired Deadpool to lead a bunch of Dora Milaje to try and assassinate Dr. Doom? That story is possible now.
The Negative Zone (currently part of the Fantastic Four rights) opens up a bunch of stories for a bunch of MCU characters, especially the Avengers.
Galactus (currently part of the Fantastic Four rights) stories are never right unless every single hero on Earth is part of the fight. That's possible now.
Oh, and Beast can join the "science bros" on the Avengers with Tony and Bruce. His sense of humor should fit in nicely there.
Space-oriented characters like Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain Marvel can interact with the Shi'ar Empire and the Brood. I can only imagine how much fun James Gunn would have adding the Starjammers (space pirates who are violently anti-slavery) to the Guardians movies.
Magneto's introduction to the MCU would single-handedly solve half of Marvel's infamous villain problem. The Genosha storyline with all of the MCU as a backdrop would be heartbreaking.
A vs X. Holy shit, A vs X is possible now. Is that good or bad? I never read it.
The number of stories that open up as a result of this is very large.
Less Inhumans
Once Marvel gets their favorite racism/bigotry metaphor back, there's no more need to push the Inhumans on the rest of us. Marvel's clumsy attempts to refashion the Inhumans into a replacement racism metaphor wasn't working in the comics or in that stupid TV show.
Now that the X-Men are back with the MCU, the only remaining useful function of the Inhumans is to serve as a vehicle for introducing Kamala Khan to mainstream audiences. The less, the better if you ask me.
What are your thoughts?
What's good about this merger? What's bad? What are you looking forward to?
WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fox-disney-announce-new-deal-1529496937
Video (ComicBookCast on YouTube):
This just means that FOX stockholders accepted Disney's new offer. The federal government could still theoretically throw this deal out, and government approval will take around 2 years.
So for those of us anxious to see what the MCU would do with some of their most popular characters, we still have to wait 2 years before they start making any movies.
Even though there are aspects of this deal that have me slobbering, there's lots of downsides.
Trust/Antitrust
This means there will be fewer corporations making major motion pictures. Less competition is good for Disney stockholders, but less competition is ultimately bad for the consumer. This leads to the next problem:
FOX Was Starting To Get Superhero Movies Right
Disney has made it clear that they are all about big tentpole all the time. They're not interested in making smaller budget movies that take more risks, and I think that's a mistake.
A great example of this is the "Star Wars Story" movies (Rogue One, Solo). I really think both of those movies should have been medium budget movies that took more risks. They are my least favorite of the modern incarnation of Star Wars movies, and I think they've suffered from Disney's "everything has to be a blockbuster" approach to making movies. That might be fine for MCU movies, and I like the results with the "main" Star Wars movies (episodes 7 & 8), but I think Rogue One and Solo suffered from this.
By contrast, FOX was starting to figure out that not every superhero story has to be a big budget blockbuster, and was starting to make really good lower budget movies that took bigger risks (Deadpool, Logan, and the upcoming New Mutants).
Granted, FOX has produced quite a few duds in blockbuster X-Men movies. X2 took one of the best X-Men stories (God Loves, Man Kills), and stripped out pretty much everything that made that story interesting and relevant. With all the homosexual metaphors added by Bryan Singer, the criticism of religion inherent in the story would have been even more topical and relevant. Unfortunately, Marvel comics was brave enough to criticize religion for its role in Nazi Germany, pre-Civil War America, and in post-Civil War American racism back in the 1980s, but two decades later FOX was too chickenshit to risk criticizing religion even a tiny bit, and X2 really suffered from that decision.
X3 was an even bigger disaster, and X-Men: Apocalypse was forgettable.
But still, it looked like FOX was moving in the right direction with those smaller budget movies, and I was actually looking forward to seeing how the experiments from those smaller movies affected FOX's next big budget movie. Now we will never see that.
With Disney's obsession with blockbusters, we're just not going to see any more highly experimental superhero movies like we were starting to get from FOX, and that makes me sad.
Now for the good stuff:
A Fantastic Four that doesn't suck big, sweaty donkey balls
FOX failed miserably with the Fantastic Four movies, even after Pixar showed exactly what a Fantastic Four movie should be like. Not only did they screw up the titular heroes, but they royally botched one of the most iconic comic book supervillains of all time: Dr. Doom.
How can you screw that up. It's a pretty simple outline for a villain: he's yet another would-be conqueror, but the twist is, if you let him take over, he really would eliminate all crime and all poverty, but at the expense of all freedom.
This opens up a ton of stories
Black Panther turned out to be popular, didn't he? Well, now he can marry Ororo (Storm) from the X-Men, just like in the comics. Once he does that, that means we get that ugly breakup with Nakia that results in Nakia becoming a full-on supervillain. I suspect Lupita Nyongo is going to be really interesting as a villain.
Of course, the famously xenophobic Wakandans will reject Ororo as a queen, leading to a divorce that neither spouse really wants. That should be deliciously tragic. With or without the divorce, T'Challa becomes the most important human ally to the mutant cause, even more important than Xavier's ex-girlfriends combined (hey, why didn't FOX explore that? Didn't the concept of allies in social justice movements warrant a metaphor in their X-Men movies?).
The most delicious thing is that we can now have the Wakandan-Latverian war and watch young Shuri make Dr. Doom bow in submission. Tell me you wouldn't enjoy that. Did I mention that T'Challa once hired Deadpool to lead a bunch of Dora Milaje to try and assassinate Dr. Doom? That story is possible now.
The Negative Zone (currently part of the Fantastic Four rights) opens up a bunch of stories for a bunch of MCU characters, especially the Avengers.
Galactus (currently part of the Fantastic Four rights) stories are never right unless every single hero on Earth is part of the fight. That's possible now.
Oh, and Beast can join the "science bros" on the Avengers with Tony and Bruce. His sense of humor should fit in nicely there.
Space-oriented characters like Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain Marvel can interact with the Shi'ar Empire and the Brood. I can only imagine how much fun James Gunn would have adding the Starjammers (space pirates who are violently anti-slavery) to the Guardians movies.
Magneto's introduction to the MCU would single-handedly solve half of Marvel's infamous villain problem. The Genosha storyline with all of the MCU as a backdrop would be heartbreaking.
A vs X. Holy shit, A vs X is possible now. Is that good or bad? I never read it.
The number of stories that open up as a result of this is very large.
Less Inhumans
Once Marvel gets their favorite racism/bigotry metaphor back, there's no more need to push the Inhumans on the rest of us. Marvel's clumsy attempts to refashion the Inhumans into a replacement racism metaphor wasn't working in the comics or in that stupid TV show.
Now that the X-Men are back with the MCU, the only remaining useful function of the Inhumans is to serve as a vehicle for introducing Kamala Khan to mainstream audiences. The less, the better if you ask me.
What are your thoughts?
What's good about this merger? What's bad? What are you looking forward to?