Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Are Big Hollywood Studios Buying Anime Distributors?
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1792 Location: South America |
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Movie theaters and cable are going to be all bankrupt soon. That is because these are now just two obsolete ways of consuming film just like cassetes and CDs are obsolete ways of listening to music. Why should a person go to a movie theater when one can buy a LED TV for a few hundred dollars and watch movies with higher image and sound quality and why a person should pay to watch TV channels when you can pay to stream everything you want at the time you want? In a decade companies like Netflix and Amazon will eventually wipe out the likes of Disney/Paramount/20th century Fox/Columbia Pictures. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Oh, thought the answer was going to be, "Because they don't know what it IS."
(That's why they go out and do Netflix adaptations of Death Note, based, quote, "on the hit manga title!" Ever notice that no American anime adaptation ever seems to be based on the anime? That's because NYT doesn't publish the weekly anime sales at Barnes & Noble, and US execs wouldn't know how else to gauge what the Young People are watching.) They think they're being a trend, not a title, and then they can't figure out why that "trend" can't be marketed if they happen to pick the wrong title. Oh well, it's just easier to buy companies, and let them figure out their own Young People, with their Titans and their One Piece and their streaming Crunchyroll. |
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DeTroyes
Posts: 521 |
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Someone still has to make the content to feed the ravenous hordes. I agree the movie companies are likely to be moving away from motion pictures, but they're still well positioned to produce original content. |
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Agent355
Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I definitely see the bombardment of blockbusters as a symptom of the movie industries' desperation rather than proof of the contrary. They need to make movies that require the most technology and visual enhancements to appreciate the "experience" of what they are selling--in more and more expensive ways--3D, 4D, IMAX, etc. I've been increasingly amused at the reaction of old school critics like The New York Times A. O. Scott, who I imagine are being practically forced to watch these movies Clockwork Orange style, "it's Marvel's world, we just live in it!" They are not impressed. But it's not necessarily a good thing for audiences and definitely not for independent artists, writers, directors and producers--there may be more ways to make a film if you don't care about budget or sales, but to get a decent size budget and distribution deal, you probably have to get Netflix to like you! |
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RedSwirl
Posts: 344 |
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Please. I need LOGH and Votoms on Netflix or Amazon. I still don't know about buying an annual HIDive subscription just for two shows. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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No, actually they didn’t. Fox specifically excluded assets they thought would cause issues, such as their broadcasting network and sports channels. That has nothing to do with the DOJ. They have their blessing with no conditions on the merger, other than those that Fox had already planned. Disney isn’t acquiring the entire company, just select assets. However, that doesn’t change the fact that two of the largest cable channel operators will become one, and that one studio will now control 40% of the box office. As I said, US antitrust regulations are designed primarily to combat horizontal mergers that cut down on competition, not vertical mergers. Considering that the Comcast-Universal Merger had already been approved, with specific conditions, there was little chance of the AtT deal being blocked. However, the Disney Fox deal is a horizontal merger than not only cuts down on competition, but also violates provisions of the Paramount decree. But rather than attempt enforce that decree in court, which has stood for over 50 years, the current administration is actually looking into undoing parts of that decree so deals like the Disney Fox one will be easier to do. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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Disney is acquiring select assets of Fox for $73 BILLION dollars. No company, let alone one as smart as Disney, is going to spend that kind of money for a single film franchise, even the X-Men and it’s spin offs. They would never break even on the deal. Disney acquired the entire Marvel company for just a small fraction of that. Had Disney just wanted the X-Men films, they simply could have acquired the studio for far less, and let someone else pick up the rest of the company. After all, 21st Century Fox was clearly willing to sell of just part of the company, as Disney isn’t even getting the entire business. While those characters are definitely nice to have in house, this was about far more than them. Companies are trying to acquire as much content as they can, especially as they try to battle companies like Netflix and Amazon. The box office isn’t Disney’s only business, and going forward, it won’t be their most important one. |
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Top Gun
Posts: 4736 |
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This is such a bizarre viewpoint. Unless you are absurdly rich and have a huge amount of interior space, there's no universe in which even a higher-end home-theater setup can duplicate the scale and power of a theater screening, and the majority of us out there don't even have anything resembling an actual "home theater." Likewise, CDs to this day remain by far the most convenient means of getting the highest-quality audio in DRM-free format, content that doesn't vanish when a subscription runs out. (Not that that seems to stop people from willingly choosing inferior quality: the fact that people are willing to sit through a movie viewed on a 4-inch screen utterly blows my mind.) As for me, I guess I'll be sitting here in the Luddite corner with my cable subscription. Consuming content via streaming just fundamentally doesn't work for me. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Wow, $73 billion? Yeah, the MCU isn't worth THAT much, but I don't think that affects the reasoning behind the Fox buyout that much. I still believe that if Fox allowed Disney to use Deadpool, the X-Men characters, the Fantastic Four, and characters directly associated with them the way Sony did with Spider-Man, the buyout wouldn't have happened. I don't think Disney ever really coveted the rights to The Simpsons, X-Files, Predator, Alien and such as much as the remaining Marvel characters, but Disney couldn't have acquired those Marvel characters without paying that $73 billion and would've needed those other rights to make up for the amount paid.
Don't worry, it doesn't work for me either. I really enjoy the stumble-across method of discovering new shows (that is, channel-surfing, or rather, TV Guide surfing, as my satellite subscription gives me access to a live TV Guide schedule, which I can then go up and down to find new shows to watch), which the streaming services don't really provide in the way that I want. |
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Kadmos1
Posts: 13590 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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The fact that 1000s will lose their jobs with the pending Fox-Disney merger/buyout I think is horrible. As much as deep-pocketed lawyers could bring up antitrust lawsuits against this merger, the Disney Empire has the USDOJ wrapped around their corporate mouse fingers.
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#854626
Posts: 171 |
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i hate to think of funimation and crunchyroll cancelling there simulcasting deal. thats always been the biggest problem with anime/manga liscensing in america imo. everyone owns things related to things the other company owns. (viz has dbz manga, funimation has anime.)
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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Disney needs more content, that’s all there is to it. The Marvel properties are nice icing on the cake, but the deal would have likely happened with or without them. Fox has more businesses besides its film production. And Fox was willing to sell the business in parts, which is why the broadcast network, sports channels, and Fox News aren’t included in the deal. If Disney was primarily motivated just by the studio, then they could have bid on just those assets. They also wanted Fox’s TV assets. And while you may think that they weren’t interested in the Simpsons, it’s one of Fox’s most valuable assets, bringing in hundreds of millions in licensing and syndication each year. Disney is the king of merchandise licensing and they’re probably thrilled to add that to their portfolio. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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I think Fox has a lot to do with it too. I’d bet money that if the situations were reversed, and ATT tried to buy Fox and Disney tried to acquire Time Warner, that the DOJ would still have fought the TW deal. |
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TemplateR
Posts: 77 |
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Here in Germany, NBC Universal has started to sell their animes....I think............a few years ago, but till now they sold only 2 Anime-Series and planning to release "Drifters" and "Berserk". They involvement of Anime-Releases are atm very, very low. Besides the "Supernatural"-Anime, Warner Brothers doesn't even sell their produced animes themselves. They always sell their release-license to other "local" companies. In Short: Even if a big hollywood-studio is producing anime, that doesn't mean, that the studio will also be released by themselves. |
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Shay Guy
Posts: 2240 |
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Lots of TVs being sold nowadays are smart TVs -- ours came with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video apps build in. Even without a smart TV, the cheapest Roku is about $30. |
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