SOLD! Disney buys part of 21st Century Fox in $52.4 billion deal

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SOLD! Disney buys part of 21st Century Fox in $52.4 billion deal
Associated Press
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Published:
December 14, 2017
Updated:
December 14, 2017 9:02 AM EST
FILE - In this Aug. 8, 2017, file photo, The Walt Disney Co. logo appears on a screen above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Disney is buying a large part of the Murdoch family's 21st Century Fox in a $52.4 billion deal, announced Thursday, Dec. 14, including film and television studios, cable and international TV businesses as it tries to meet competition from technology companies in the entertainment business.Richard Drew / AP
NEW YORK — Disney is buying a large part of the Murdoch family’s 21st Century Fox for about $52.4 billion in stock, including film and television studios and cable and international TV businesses, as it tries to meet competition from technology companies in the entertainment business.
The deal gives Disney film businesses including Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox 2000, which together are the homes of Avatar, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool. On the television side, Disney will get Twentieth Century Fox Television, FX Productions and Fox21, with shows including “The Simpsons” and “Modern Family.”
21st Century Fox shareholders will receive 0.2745 Disney shares for each share they own. The transaction also includes approximately $13.7 billion in debt.
Robert Iger will continue as chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Co. through the end of 2021.
Before the buyout, 21st Century Fox will separate the Fox Broadcasting network and stations, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FS1, FS2 and Big Ten Network into a newly listed company that will be spun off to its shareholders. That Rupert Murdoch and his sons were willing to sell off much of the business that has been built up over decades came as a shock to the entertainment industry.
The entertainment business is going through big changes. TV doesn’t have a monopoly on home entertainment anymore. There’s Netflix, which is spending up to $8 billion on programming next year. Amazon is building its own library, having splashed out on global TV rights to “Lord of the Rings.” Facebook, Google and Apple are also investing in video.
As consumers spend more time online, TV’s share of U.S. ad spending is shrinking. Advertisers are following consumer attention to the internet, where Google and Facebook win the vast majority of advertisers’ dollars.
“We’ve been talking about cord cutting for the better part of a decade. But now it’s real,” USC Annenberg communications professor Chris Smith said. The media companies have to compete with the internet giants for consumers’ attention — and the younger generations pay more attention to YouTube, Facebook and other “platforms” than traditional TV, Smith said.
To combat this trend, Disney is launching new ESPN- and Disney-branded streaming services over the next couple of years. It could beef them up with some of the assets it’s acquiring from Fox, making them exclusive to its services and sharpening its ability to compete with Netflix for consumer dollars.
“The core underlying driver for this deal in our opinion is the impending battle royale for content and streaming services vs. the Netflix machine,” GBH analyst Daniel Ives wrote.
Not everyone thinks this is a good bet by Disney, though. Rich Greenfield, a longtime Disney critic, thinks the deal is a bad idea that ties Disney to older TV-distribution systems — cable and satellite TV — rather than helping it look toward the future.
He also notes that regulators may not like the idea of combining two major movie studios. The Justice Department surprised many in the industry and on Wall Street when it sued to block another media megamerger, AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, in November.
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MURDOCH FAMILY TAKES A BOW
Rupert Murdoch built 21st Century Fox and News Corp. out of an inheritance from his father in Australia. He bought a string of papers there, in the U.K. and the U.S., building an influential platform for his views. He expanded into TV and movies, launching the Fox network and Fox News and changing the face of American news and entertainment.
“Rupert has spent many, many years assembling the components of his empire,” said NYU business professor Samuel Craig, who specializes in the entertainment industry.
Rupert Murdoch has ostensibly already handed the reins over to a new generation at Fox. His son James is CEO, while his other son, Lachlan, like Rupert, has the title of executive chairman.
The Murdoch empire has already been divided. After a phone-hacking newspaper scandal in the U.K., News Corp. was split off into a separate company for the publishing and newspaper businesses, which include the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun and The Times in the U.K., and book publisher HarperCollins. Now Fox is also being split up as the company sets itself up to deal with the growing power of the tech industry.
“The Murdochs realize they don’t have the same kind of leverage Disney has, the same kind of brand power,” Smith said.
It would be harder to launch a Fox-branded streaming service that attracts lots of the new generation of consumers, for example. Smith said that makes it a great time to sell off the entertainment business.
Fox is also selling to Disney its substantial overseas operations. It is offloading its 39 per cent stake in European satellite-TV and broadcaster Sky after running into regulatory roadblocks in the U.K. trying to take over the rest of the company, in part because of how Fox handled the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News. Disney is also acquiring Star India, a major media company with dozens of sports and entertainment channels.
Fox will be left with the live events, news and sports, that are key parts of the traditional TV bundle. There is speculation that the Murdochs would want to recombine what’s the slimmed-down Fox with News Corp.
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MIGHTIER MOUSE
It’s not clear what Disney will want or be able to include from Fox in its own upcoming services. But it’s possible to make some educated guesses.
The Disney-branded service, expected in 2019, will have classic and upcoming movies from the studio, shows from Disney Channel, and the “Star Wars” and Marvel movies.
What It Would Mean For Marvel If Disney Bought... 0:50
Disney will also win majority control of Hulu, both its live-TV service and the older service with a big library of TV shows.
Disney could continue to add movies and TV shows from Fox’s library to its services, making them more attractive compared with Netflix’s offerings. The combined libraries of the Disney and Fox movie and TV studios could have more titles than Netflix, Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar said. Buying Fox’s FX networks will add edgy TV shows that complement Disney’s long list of kid-friendly series and films, he said.
Greenfield, however, notes that a lot of programming wouldn’t be immediately available to Disney. Fox movies are exclusive to HBO through 2022, for example.
Disney also plans an ESPN Plus service for next year. It isn’t a duplicate of the ESPN TV network, but it will stream tennis matches along with major-league baseball, hockey and soccer games, as well as college sports. It might be able to add more sports if Disney buys Fox’s 22 local sports networks — cable channels that show popular sports in the viewer’s region.
Disney also owns Marvel, but not all the Marvel characters. It’s made movies starring Thor, Doctor Strange and Captain America and the Avengers crew. But the X-Men are at Fox. Bringing them home under one roof could mean movies with more of the characters together.
———
Michelle Chapman in New York contributed to this report.
Disney buying part of 21st Century Fox in $52.4 billion deal | Toronto Sun
 
C

Curious Cdn

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Murdoch hung on to his propaganda organ "Fox News", though. Imagine if Disney had hold of that? All of this lying weasels on Fox would be real weasels complete with fur and big doe eyes.
 
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As Disney swallows Fox, a new era dawns for Hollywood
Associated Press
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Published:
December 15, 2017
Updated:
December 15, 2017 7:16 AM EST
NEW YORK — After years of tremors, the earthquake that had long been predicted finally shook Hollywood.
Disney’s deal to purchase most of 21st Century Fox ends the era of the “Big Six” major movie studios, toppling one of the industry’s most famed studios and dramatically redrawing the Hollywood map.
Disney’s move — to pay $52.4 billion in stock for Fox assets — has countless reverberations. But by effectively absorbing Fox’s film studio, 20th Century Fox, Disney has rapidly accelerated the industry contraction that many considered inevitable in an era of flat-lining ticket sales and new streaming competitors like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
The Big Six are now the Big Five — and the mightiest of them all has just been supersized.
The Disney deal hasn’t just made 20th Century Fox’s 3,200 employees anxious about their future within Disney. It’s sent shockwaves through an industry that has until now bent under the pressures of the new digital landscape, but not broken. Now, Hollywood as an industry is quite literally shrinking.
“The strongest will get stronger and the weaker will fall off or merge with other entities,” said Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “The future is right now and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.”
Many analysts consider further consolidation simply a matter of time. Before Rupert Murdoch earlier this fall began shopping Fox, most expected the first studio to fall would be either Viacom’s Paramount Pictures (5 per cent of the market) or Sony Pictures (8.8 per cent), both of which have struggled in recent years and replaced their chief executives. Lionsgate and CBS are also frequent sources of speculation.
Fox is bigger, though. Founded in 1935 by the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Films, 20th Century Fox is the home of “The Sound of Music,” the original “Star Wars” and the highest grossing film of all-time, “Avatar.” The studio has generally ranked either third or fourth in market share. This year, it’s fourth with 12.3 per cent, following the market-leader Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal.
Fox isn’t necessarily disappearing. Disney will lease its fabled Los Angeles lot for the next seven years. But 20th Century Fox will be folded into Walt Disney Studios. Its movie-making operations will be reduced and likely restructured.
As a studio, Disney is already based on several distinct silos of brands: Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm. Its strength in intellectual properties — especially “Star Wars” and its library of animation classics — has made the studio dominant. In a conference call with investors Thursday, Disney chief executive Robert Iger suggested Fox may function similarly as a label within Disney.
“We have not only respected the culture of those organizations but respected and appreciated the talent that came with those acquisitions,” Iger said.
Before it sold a ticket for “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Disney already has three of the top six movies of the year: “Beauty and the Beast,” “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2” and “Thor: Ragnarok.” It has used its might to enforce more onerous terms with theatres on films like “The Last Jedi.” Disney is requiring many theatre operators to share a higher percentage — 65 per cent — of ticket sales. The film is expected to come close to grossing $500 million worldwide this weekend.
The combination of sensibilities between Disney and Fox, has intrigued others. Though it’s easy to see the planned quartet of “Avatar” movies under a Disney banner (“Avatar” already has a place in Disney theme parks), many of Fox’s franchises, including “X-Men” and “The Kingsman,” are well off-brand for the family-friendly Disney. It hasn’t released an R-rated movie in four years.
“Time to uncork that explosive sexual tension between Deadpool and Mickey Mouse,” Ryan Reynolds tweeted after earlier reports of the Disney-Fox deal.
Disney, which sold Miramax Pictures in 2005, has lacked other kinds of films, too. Fox’s specialty label, Fox Searchlight, is among the industry’s art-house leaders. Two Searchlight films — “The Shape of Water” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” — along with Fox’s “The Post” have made the studio the leading company of this year’s awards season, at least with the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Iger voiced his support for maintaining those businesses. “We like being in the business of making quality movies,” said Iger. “We fully intend to stay in those businesses.”
The deal also, perhaps crucially, gives Disney the extensive Fox library for Disney’s planned streaming service, set to debut in 2019. Disney is now better armed to compete against deep-pocketed digital competitors. Netflix has said it will spend up to $8 billion on original content next year.
“It’s really a battle about the future of streaming,” said Peter Labuza, a film historian and researcher at the University of Southern California. “Disney needs all this material outside of its own brand which now is its own Disney product, Lucasfilm, Pixar. But this can fill in a lot of the space in a streaming site that can compete with, essentially, Netflix.”
That’s a component of the deal that will strike fear in the hearts of exhibitors. Disney has pursued an almost completely event-movie strategy (it’s releasing only eight movies this year), and it’s expected to cut back Fox’s theatrical slate. That’s reason for concern for already struggling theatre owners. Box office revenues were up just 1 per cent last year, and are expected to slide this year.
“They can’t be pleased,” said Bock of exhibitors. “Less product just means less revenue in their minds.”
But Disney has also, up until now, been a staunch defender of the traditional theatrical window. For that reason, as well as its reputation for quality, the world’s largest theatre chain, AMC, hasn’t sounded any alarms over the purchase. Last week on CNBC, Adam Aron, AMC chief executive, applauded Disney’s track record. “AMC has made a lot of money partnering with Disney studios,” he said.
Whichever direction Disney chooses to go, it will have the sway — with approximately 40 per cent market share — to set the course for the entire industry.
Hollywood may have shrunk into not the Big Five, but the Big One.
——
Film Writer Lindsey Bahr contributed to this report.
As Disney swallows Fox, a new era dawns for Hollywood | Toronto Sun
 
Walter

Walter

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avro25 said:
Which you support.

You love the gays.
Click to expand...
As do you.

TenPenny said:
Walter can't provide any evidence to prove his assertion that nobody ever got laid off in East Germany.
Click to expand...
From Wikipedia, emphasis mine.

Consumption and jobs
Many western commentators have maintained that loyalty to the SED was a primary criterion for getting a good job, and that professionalism was secondary to political criteria in personnel recruitment and development.[65]

No worker could be sacked, unless for serious misconduct or incompetence; even in such cases, alternative work would be offered. The GDR had no system of unemployment benefit because the concept of unemployment did not exist.

With a very low birth rate and a high rate of exodus, East Germany was losing workers. As the goal of socialism is the elimination of capitalist economics, the GDR strove to reduce wealth disparity between individuals through the elimination of private property, businesses and stores. While enforcement of this ideal led to a more economically even society, it prompted many with economic ambition or those who did not agree with its enforcement to escape—typically those with higher education: doctors, scientists, engineers, and skilled workers. This growing loss of skilled personnel was intended to be curtailed with the building of the wall.[citation needed]

Beginning in 1963 with a series of secret international agreements, East Germany recruited workers from Poland, Hungary, Cuba, Albania, Mozambique, Angola and North Vietnam. They numbered more than 100,000 by 1989. Many, such as
 
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