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Answerman - Why Are Big Hollywood Studios Buying Anime Distributors?

And here I thought I was hopelessly late to the party by cutting cable only six months ago. While I can see why cable companies are taking a hit, I'm honestly a little surprised that cinemas are in trouble too. I knew the "Thank you for coming to the movies" ads I'd seen after pre-shows were a response to come kind of piracy movie boom, but I honestly didn't think movie theaters were in that dire straits. It certainly doesn't really feel that way to me as a consumer, with the near-constant bombardment of MCU movies we're getting, though that might speak more to the patently ridiculous money-might of something like Disney rather than being an indicator of overall cinema trends.

I am a little concerned about the potential of Funimation and CR having to part ways though. I thought their quasi-merger was an overall net-positive for the community at large, so I'd be sad to see that go.

In a decade companies like Netflix and Amazon will eventually wipe out the likes of Disney/Paramount/20th century Fox/Columbia Pictures.

whiskeyii wrote:

I'm honestly a little surprised that cinemas are in trouble too. I knew the "Thank you for coming to the movies" ads I'd seen after pre-shows were a response to come kind of piracy movie boom, but I honestly didn't think movie theaters were in that dire straits. It certainly doesn't really feel that way to me as a consumer, with the near-constant bombardment of MCU movies we're getting, though that might speak more to the patently ridiculous money-might of something like Disney rather than being an indicator of overall cinema trends.

The way I see it, I think it's more the result of ballooning movie budgets in an arms race to out-spectacle their competitors.

HiDive/Sentai Filmworks will be next. Best bet is they will be absorbed into either the Amazon or Netflix gestalts, but CBS, Disney, or ATT are not out of the question. If I had to place bets I'd say Amazon, due to their catalog of older material (something Amazon seems to like in their potential acquisitions) and the working relationship Sentai appears to have with Amazon.

dragonrider_cody wrote:

All that being said, I think it’s ridiculous that our government spent millions fighting the Time Warner-ATT deal, while not even negotiating terms on the Disney-Fox one.

They did negotiate the only issue they found were Fox's local sports channels and Disney had no problem with getting rid of them once the deal is finalized.

I'm no authority so don't quote me on this, but observing interactions behind the scenes between Disney and Fox regarding the Fox-owned Marvel cinematic characters like Deadpool and the X-Men, it looked like the people at Fox were adamantly trying to not let their characters be used in the Disney MCU films. This is why, I think, Disney bought Fox but hasn't looked over in Sony's direction: Disney's people want those Marvel characters at any cost (apparently...$21 billion, I think?). Sony has allowed Disney to put Spider-Man into those movies, so now there's no beef between them, at least in so far as the Marvel characters go. Disney could've bought Sony Pictures but didn't. Fox, on the other hand, showed no signs of also doing that (and made movies like Fant4stic solely to prevent the rights from going back to Disney), so Disney bought Fox as a last resort.

In other words, I strongly believe that the Disney-Fox merger was solely to get those Marvel characters' theatrical rights and literally nothing else.

Movie theaters and cable are going to be all bankrupt soon. That is because these are now just two obsolete ways of consuming film just like cassetes and CDs are obsolete ways of listening to music.

Why should a person go to a movie theater when one can buy a LED TV for a few hundred dollars and watch movies with higher image and sound quality and why a person should pay to watch TV channels when you can pay to stream everything you want at the time you want?

In a decade companies like Netflix and Amazon will eventually wipe out the likes of Disney/Paramount/20th century Fox/Columbia Pictures.

Disney is acquiring select assets of Fox for $73 BILLION dollars. No company, let alone one as smart as Disney, is going to spend that kind of money for a single film franchise, even the X-Men and it’s spin offs. They would never break even on the deal. Disney acquired the entire Marvel company for just a small fraction of that. Had Disney just wanted the X-Men films, they simply could have acquired the studio for far less, and let someone else pick up the rest of the company. After all, 21st Century Fox was clearly willing to sell of just part of the company, as Disney isn’t even getting the entire business.

While those characters are definitely nice to have in house, this was about far more than them. Companies are trying to acquire as much content as they can, especially as they try to battle companies like Netflix and Amazon. The box office isn’t Disney’s only business, and going forward, it won’t be their most important one.

As for me, I guess I'll be sitting here in the Luddite corner with my cable subscription. Consuming content via streaming just fundamentally doesn't work for me.

Wow, $73 billion? Yeah, the MCU isn't worth THAT much, but I don't think that affects the reasoning behind the Fox buyout that much. I still believe that if Fox allowed Disney to use Deadpool, the X-Men characters, the Fantastic Four, and characters directly associated with them the way Sony did with Spider-Man, the buyout wouldn't have happened. I don't think Disney ever really coveted the rights to The Simpsons, X-Files, Predator, Alien and such as much as the remaining Marvel characters, but Disney couldn't have acquired those Marvel characters without paying that $73 billion and would've needed those other rights to make up for the amount paid.

The fact that 1000s will lose their jobs with the pending Fox-Disney merger/buyout I think is horrible. As much as deep-pocketed lawyers could bring up antitrust lawsuits against this merger, the Disney Empire has the USDOJ wrapped around their corporate mouse fingers.

Warner Brothers has interests in a substantial number of anime shows already.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/producer/415/Warner_Bros

NBC Universal (Japan), aka Comcast, has a lot of anime interests as well.

company#12727

(I don't really hear much about streaming programming being watched socially. It's pretty hard for the family or groups of friends to huddle around a computer monitor, and the equipment to hook it up to a larger screen costs too much and is too complicated for most people.)