While fans got excited, stock prices of the companies rose on the reports.
Could we finally be seeing the X-Men join forces with The Avengers on the silver screen?
Shares of 21st Century Fox ( FOX) jumped 10% after two news outlets reported Fox has been in talks to sell a sizable part of the company to Walt Disney. Disney ( DIS) shares rose 2% on the reports.
Talks about a possible deal between the two media giants, reported by CNBC and The Wall Street Journal, have not yet been confirmed by USA TODAY. Fox declined to comment.
According to CNBC, the talks have taken place over the last few weeks but there is no guarantee a deal will be finalized and the two sides are not in talks at the moment.
According to the reports, Fox would give up its movie studio, 20th Century Fox, and TV production assets including the National Geographic and FX cable channels. It would not sell its news or sports properties, including Fox News and Fox Business Network, to Disney, nor would it give up its local broadcast affiliates.
Traditional entertainment heavy weights are jostling for scale and content as they fend off the burgeoning entertainment offerings of what used to be mostly distribution platforms, including Facebook and Google, as well as streaming powerhouses Netflix and Amazon.
AT&T is seeking a merger with Time Warner, and Verizon has its own video service with original programming from its acquired AOL and Yahoo properties.
Disney in August announced a new direct-to-consumer streaming service to compete with Netflix that will cut Netflix out of much of its content mix. Previously it was reported to have looked at Twitter as a possible acquisition target.
While Fox’s film division has struggled of late, it does have several popular franchises including James Cameron’s Avatar, which has four sequels currently in development.
The deal would also return to Disney the rights to the first six Star Wars films as well as some of its more popular Marvel comic book characters, the X-Men and Fantastic Four. While Disney owns the popular comic book publisher and its film division, Marvel Studios, it does not own the rights to all of the publisher’s characters.
That’s because, long before it became a blockbuster studio that would be bought by Disney in 2009 for $4 billion, Marvel sold off the film rights to several of its popular characters to various studios. Fox, as well as Sony and other studios, bought up these rights granting 20th Century Fox the ability to make movies about Wolverine and Deadpool as well as other members of the X-Men family.
With the popularity of comic book movies, those characters have led to a box office bonanza. The latest from Disney’s Marvel Studios— Thor: Ragnarok — opened this past weekend atop the domestic box office with a $121 million haul. And fans quickly got excited about the prospect of more of Marvel’s properties coming together under one roof.
«X-Men» quickly became a trending topic on Twitter with many fans tweeting their excitement about the idea of their favorite characters finally getting reunited on the silver screen.
With the large assortment of characters at its disposal, Fox has worked to build its own Marvel universe around the X-Men. The studio has three X-Men related films planned for 2018 alone, including the sequel to Ryan Reynolds’ R-rated 2016 hit Deadpool, with several other X-Men films in various stages of development, with plans to release multiple X-Men movies through 2021.
