Comments on: Disney buys Marvel (send in the anthropologists!)

By: Malcolm Cecil

Malcolm Cecil — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:29:04 +0000

Go team! Indiscrete notes from a couple of days I spent at Disney Channel this August on my blog. http://www.ordinaryculture.com

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:47:36 +0000

I await the call! Getting my Mickey Mouse/Spiderman t-shirts laundered at this moment!

By: Nyny

Nyny — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:45:18 +0000

marvel needed better channels of capitlizing on their content, and disney needed content better aimed at boys. win win – as long as disney stay’s out of it. and world internally, is that we are.

By: Dan Soltzberg

Dan Soltzberg — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:11:23 +0000

On a narrative level, Disney’s move seems perfect–a reconciliation with the shadow self.

By: Mary Walker

Mary Walker — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:49:28 +0000

Hi Grant — thanks for the mention, per our earlier conversations about the cultural & business issues around mergers.

Per Disney-Marvel — my sources in the fanboy/girl communities tell me reaction is mixed…some ppl freaking out that Marvel’s track record
of “shades of grey” characters & stories will be disney-fied into pap. Other fans saying that Miramax successfully continued to have its own
brand separate from corp Disney after it was acquired in 1993. then again the Weinsteins did finally break from Disney/Miramax in 2005,
citing power struggles over creative and budget issues…so who knows.

Per mergers: I’ve decided that much depends on the implementation of the merger. Are you 1) cramming together the two entities into one surviving entity, like the mythical mating amoebas, or 2) allowing the two sibling companies to remain largely separate under a high-level corp umbrella parent.

If cost cutting was the objective of the merger, then 1) is usually necessary — but also involved huge cultural/social unheaval. If the merger was about capturing market share, or expanding skill / core competencies capture, or adding new brands to the corp stable — then 2) may be a better approach. If you want to keep the acquired entity performing like it has been — then you have to largely maintain the internal biz / social / cultural environment that enabled it to be successful. Otherwise you’ll see all those expensively acquired human assets walking out the door.

It’s like buying a saltwater fish tank and putting all those saltwater fish into your existing freshwater tank to save $$ on tank maintenance
– and then wondering why all your new SW fish are dead dead dead. It’s because they couldn’t thrive in the environment that you forced
them into.

By: srp

srp — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:20:31 +0000

I think the biggest cultural gap has already been closed. Decades ago, Marvel was clueless about Hollywood culture–its mores and business practices. They kept getting into bed with low-rent operators who turned out craptastic, cheesy versions of Marvel properties for TV and theater. (I have a very slight fondness for some of these efforts–the 1970s Doctor Strange TV movie with Jessica Walter as the demon sorceress has some delightfully campy moments–but for the most part these products sank beneath the waves and had no cultural or economic impact.) During this period, DC comics, which was owned by Warner and so infused with Hollywood savvy, was able to do some decent things like the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and the Tim Burton Batmans.

Stage 2 at Marvel occurred after many changes of ownership and management. They licensed out to a better class of partner and got small but low-risk shares of titanic movies like Spider-Man and X-Men. The failures were conventional Hollywood failures (Daredevil, the first Hulk, the second and third Punishers) rather than the old Grade-D disasters.

Finally, they got to Stage 3 and put up more of the capital and took more of a steering role in developing Iron Man and some of the more recent properties. This required them to develop even more connections and understanding of production, distribution, and marketing filmed entertainment. By now, their conversations with Disney execs should include lots of shared grammar and semantics. Twenty years ago, it would have been tragi-comical.

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:48:22 +0000

It's funny that the news of the merger led to a lot of Twitter/blog/etc. mashups of Wolverine with Mickey Mouse ears, etc. The cultural outcroppings of the two brands, dark and sweet, and lo and behold the humor of the collision. These cultures can't combine, says the wry public, because look at the combined product. Ahhh, but as usual, we ignore the Japanese. They made Marvel cute (kawaii) a long time ago: http://www.portigal.com/blog/kawaii-superheroes/