The Walt Disney Co. will be buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion with 40 percent stock and 60 percent cash. $30 per share will go to Marvel shareholders, plus an additional 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share. The deal, which was first brought up several months ago, only recently started to gain traction and, though it’s been approved by both companies’ boards, has yet to be approved by Marvel shareholders.

Under the deal, Disney gets all of Marvel’s 5,000+ characters, including Iron Man, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and Thor. What Disney won’t get are some of the film and theme park rights, at least not right away. Marvel’s deals with several studios will remain, including “Spider-Man” at Sony, “X-Men” at Fox, and the five remaining pictures with Paramount, which includes “Iron Man 2,” “Thor,” “The First Avenger: Captain America,” “The Avengers,” and possibly “Ant-Man.” Universal Studios also has its Marvel-based attractions in theme parks across the world. Once the deals expire Disney controls everything, but this won’t be for up to a decade or more. Paramount will really be feeling the hurt as it already lost DreamWorks to Disney earlier this year.

Disney will benefit tremendously; DVD sales, ABC advertising, and consumer spending at theme parks have all been sagging lately, contributing to the 26 percent drop in Disney’s profits in the third quarter. Expect to see Marvel characters popping up in Disney theme parks and consumer products and be used to make further inroads into the young boys demographic. Disney’s Princesses and “Hannah Montana” have been extremely popular with girls, but it’s been hard for the company to attract the opposite sex. Marvel would make a good addition to their new Disney XD channel. There are also rumblings about something brewing between Marvel and Pixar. CHUD reports that Pixar’s “John Lasseter and Marvel honchos recently met and got so excited the suits had to tell them to calm down, the deal wasn’t done yet.”

Marvel itself will be relatively unaffected. Marvel Studios won’t be moving from its Manhattan Beach headquarters and, as Bob Iger, president and CEO of Disney, said, “if it’s not broke” then Disney won’t interfere on the movie production side of things. This will also help sell comics, which is always a good thing for a comic book company. In summary, Marvel gets more money to play with and Disney gets more merchandise to sell.

Iger said in a statement: “This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories.”

SOURCES

CHUD, Variety, New York Times, Disney press release