Disney recently completed a purchase of the majority of 21st Century Fox’s movie and television assets for 71.3 billion dollars. This deal gives Disney complete control over franchises like The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, the Simpsons, and many other popular series and movies. The deal gives Disney the rights to some fox television networks like FX and National Geographic. Additionally, Disney received Fox’s thirty percent stake in the streaming service Hulu, so they are now majority owners with a stake of sixty percent.
Disney has made many previous acquisitions before this as well. They have purchased ABC, ESPN, Marvel, and Lucasfilm to name a few. As Disney gains control of more and more media, we have to worry about something called media consolidation, which was talked about in an article on Vox that we read for our week 5 readings. Media consolidation is essentially having giant corporations own more and more of our media, so that eventually the whole media industry gets monopolized by a few dominant companies. Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox is a step closer to media consolidation, which is why I think the purchase will cause harm to the media landscape.
Disney’s continued expansion across the entertainment platform means that they’re in control of a large part of the market, especially in the streaming service. An article written on CNBC goes in depth about the success of Disney+ and how Disney wants to expand and take over the streaming market. The fact that Disney already controls so much of the streaming media is a negative in my opinion, because they now have the ability to control prices and the messages that movies and TV shows demonstrate.
In the lecture videos, we spoke about the Telecommunications act of 1996, and how it overhauled media laws and let media companies grow very large. This change in law back in 1996 was the start of Disney’s expansion in the media landscape, as the change in law allowed Disney to purchase ABC.
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