Ah more news about Disney and Marvel joining forces. Tomorrow is the day the deal goes official and ink hits paper. But already there is a nervous buzz about what this means to Marvel.
Disney’s Robert Iger told the Associated Press yesterday that the company’s plans for Marvel involve using some of the thousands of lesser-known characters in a variety of ways. “Instead of making a $200 million movie and kind of betting the farm on one character, you can develop a television pilot, a television series,” Iger said of Disney’s designs on its new catalog of goodies.
I can think of three immediate reasons why that’s the way to go. Number one, Marvel isn’t doing that right now. Its video game market is there, the comics still sell, and there are the movies. But TV has lagged behind the others. So this kind of move would bolster that part of the empire.
So all those over reacting fanboys out there screaming on their myspace pages that Disney is going to nerf Marvel comics can just exhale. Goofy is not going to appear in Avengers.
Marvel owns literally thousands of character ideas that have never even seen print. Disney wants to run with those as well as lesser known or less popular characters to make TV Cartoons, video games and other merchandise. Thats what the House of Mouse does.
And frankly Marvel is not exploiting those characters, so why not? Maybe they don’t have the resources to explore them all. Disney does. Maybe they don’t want to take the risk on them? Disney does. Its not about changing what Marvel is already doing. Its about empowering them with an empire of resources to monetize on their products.
But Marvel will always be Marvel. A separate entity that is owned by Disney. Marvel has no intention of taking the existing franchises that are already in motion in print or in film and taking them in new directions or merging the realities. (Though a Kingdom Hearts style game mixing them would be wicked cool)
Sure, they might take some D-Listers and make a TV series, but they won’t do anything to hurt Marvel as a whole. That just doesn’t make sense to them.
Disney only cares about the money. Not branding the product to their flavour.
