I suppose I don’t really have much of anything intelligent to add and in the 30-plus hours since it’s happened, it’s been analyzed to death (and people were quick with the mashups of Disney and Marvel characters).
Adweek probably had one of the more interesting dissections (Note to Adweek: Lame headline. It’s going to bring changes? Really? Yes, I know sometimes you just have to write a headline, but come on.)
Everyone’s talked up the “Disney wants to bring in the boys!” point, which makes sense, sure. The Adweek piece mentions that Marvel wants to bring in the ladies:
Still, Disney is expert at attracting young women to titles they may not normally be interested in (see, Johnny Depp making the ultimate young-boy fantasy, a pirate-adventure, popular with girls). For all the talk about Marvel continuing to run independently, don’t be surprised if the studio accesses Disney’s stable of talent to make some pics more girl-friendly.
If that ends up being true, that sounds pretty awesome to me.
The hopeful part of me would like to think having Disney be in control of things like marketing and branding (two things that the company is very, very good at) will allow Marvel to just make comics and develop properties. It’s probably too much to ask that it will usher in some new era of creativity, but I guess we’ll see.
But In any case to me, after the initial “Wow! That’s huge!” thing wore off, I don’t really think it’s going to change too much for either company. It doesn’t feel like a good thing or a bad thing.
