So this week gave us two things that are technically unrelated and yet keep bumping into each other in my head. Thursday night Disney announced it's buying most of 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock (plus taking on $13.7 billion of Fox's debt, which nobody seems to want to talk about but is a real number attached to a real deal). And then Thursday night, a few hours later, I was sitting in a mostly-empty theater at a preview screening watching The Last Jedi. Same day. Weird week to be a nerd with a blog.
I want to talk about the Fox thing because I think everyone's going to cover it as a "biggest media merger in years" story and miss the part that actually matters if you're the kind of person who reads a tech blog instead of Variety.
The headline is Disney gets the 20th Century Fox film and TV studio, FX, National Geographic, Fox's international networks, Star in India, and a pile of regional sports nets they're apparently required to sell off for antitrust reasons. Fine. Studio consolidation, whatever, Hollywood's done this before. The part I actually care about is two lines down in every article: Disney also picks up Fox's 30% stake in Hulu. Combined with the 30% Disney already owns and the piece Comcast holds, that puts Disney in control of Hulu outright once this closes (and it's not closing tomorrow, we're talking sometime in 2018 at the earliest, pending approval from about six different regulatory bodies).
That's the actual story. Disney has been dropping hints all year about wanting its own direct streaming thing, separate from Netflix, and everyone assumed that meant some standalone app for Marvel and Star Wars stuff. Now they'll own the majority of an already-functioning streaming platform with live TV, a real subscriber base, and none of the "build it from scratch" problem. If you've got a Hulu login right now, sometime in the next year or two you're going to notice the company steering the ship changed, even if the UI looks the same on the surface.
And then there's the rights stuff, which is the part I'll admit I have a genuinely dumb amount of personal opinion about. Fox has held the film rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four since the late 90s, which is why those characters have never shown up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe even though Marvel Studios makes the Avengers movies. This deal folds those rights back under the same corporate roof. I know it's silly to be excited about a spreadsheet consolidation, but I've wanted Wolverine in an Avengers movie since I was in college, and this is the first time in a decade that's looked like an actual possibility instead of a forum argument. Sue me.
Not everyone's thrilled, to be clear. There's already noise from people worried this is one more step toward two or three companies owning basically all mainstream American media, and honestly that complaint isn't wrong just because I'm personally happy about mutant movie rights. Both things can be true.
As for The Last Jedi, the theater was maybe a third full for the Thursday preview, which surprised me given the lines I remember from Force Awakens two years ago. I liked it more than I expected to and less than I wanted to, and I'm not going to spoil anything here except to say the casino planet stretch dragged in a way the trailers did not prepare me for. My popcorn was $9.75, which felt like its own small crime.
Anyway. Two big companies rearranging themselves and a movie about space wizards, same 24 hours. Feels about right for December.