The Mouse & The Marvel

As you might have heard earlier today, Disney bought the comic company Marvel for $4 billion. As some might have feared, this is NOT necessarily a bad thing. For one thing, Disney doesn't need the comics. Hell, it's probably more convenient since quite a few comics from then had been produced by Marvel. My blog buddy Mark Evanier had some thoughts on the subject. This being one of them:

This isn't about publishing. Disney didn't say, "Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!" They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them. But Disney's interest here is in two closely-related areas. One is to be able to market all these great characters and the history that rounds them out and makes many of them beloved. And the other reason is to make sure nobody else gets 'em.

The best news for the comic book division of Marvel in all this is how unlikely it is that anyone at Disney will care much what they do as long as the department shows a profit. If it generates new properties that can be turned into movies and video games and iPhone applications, so much the better. But the future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn't mattered for a long time.

It's more about the ever-expanding Disney Marketing Machine™. You know, that force that shoves stuff like Miley Cyrus, The Jonas Bros, unnecessary Disney movie sequels down your throat for the sole purpose of embedding them into your head only because of the relentless advertising? Yes, that. For one thing, DC has got the goods on its own, what with the awesome Comics, TV shows, and movies, along with the fact that they're owned by Time Warner. Marvel, however has been..,lacking in pretty much all departments. Sure, the movies are STARTING to get awesome, and they won't be affected by the DMM™ (Iron Man in particular being with Paramount). If the DMM™ will take full advantage of Marvel properties whose name isn't Wolverine, this can only help.

This does, however, raise the question of the theme parks. While it WOULD be awesome to see The Hulk trudge around Fantasyland

There's the fact that Marvel has its own land at Universal's Islands of Adventure. While its parks are owned by NBC/Universal (and by proxy, its parent company GE), I have no clue on how this'll play out. I'm guessing even though Marvel Island is only one land, it still seems that Disney might have some sort of odd theme park monopoly in Florida.

"Hey the recession is dropping attendance, what do we do?"
"Raise ticket prices!"
"Brilliant!"

There's also a great silver lining to this: How about thinking up some Marvel/Disney crossovers that are now much more possible? Here are some of mine or ones that I saw:

-Namor the Sub-Mariner destroying Atlantica & The Little Mermaid with it.
-Xavier Institute Musical (alt name: High School Mutanical)
-Donald meeting up with Howard The Duck
-Darkwing Duck crossing paths with Spider-Man
-Gizmoduck and Iron Man switching suits
-A Kingdom Hearts-eque epic, but with Marvel characters in place of Final Fantasy ones
-Deadpool and...anyone, really
-Scrooge McDuck competing against Kingpin on who is the most powerful...thing in the world
-and My favorite: The Jonas Brothers vs The Punisher