Disney to buy Marvel!

Especially considering the "X-men Universe" currently has about a half a dozen gay/lesbian/bisexual characters.

I don't expect that to be much of an issue. Disney has, on occasion, stuck its neck out to support the gay and lesbian community, in the face of criticism. "Gay Day" in Orlando started at Disney, and Disney continues to be part of the Gay Day celebrations. Despite that they get some negative publicity for doing so.

Now, it isn't like Disney has had actively gay characters in its children's movies, but I think it may be a little early to assume they'll tone down characters specifically for being gay.

Interestingly, Gay Day 2010 has "Heroes" as its theme: Gay Day at Disney World Orlando Florida.
 
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Does it say when the contract with Universal is done.
Disney can't throw up a theme park overnight. So they could start planning one for when Universals contract expires.
 


This saddens me. It seems that this will lead to homogenization of Marvel. Boil the whole thing down and make it kosher. I hope that doesn't happen, but if they treat the Marvel characters the way they did the Grimm's fairy tales, then the Marvel properties will be pre-production edited for niceness.:eek: The heart-warming story of The Punisher? He kills because he cares.
That isn't bad (well, might be for some people out there). What I'm thinking about are some of the dark stuff going on in, say, Dark Reign (villains as the protagonists), Marvel Zombies (flesh-eating versions of iconic Marvel heroes), most of the MAX line, Spiderman (hello, Mephisto!).

At the least, I expect some reduction in the graphic nature of the violence in the core comic books.
Sounds like you guys have bought into the squeaky-clean, kid-friendly image of Disney. Disney has, of course, cultivated that image.

So, let's take a closer look. Disney doesn't bankroll material that's graphically violent, raunchy, or dark?

Graphically violent? How about Kill Bill? The Scream movies? From Dusk Til Dawn? A bunch of the Halloween movies?

Raunchy? How about Jay & Bob Strike Back? Clerks 2? The Scary Movie franchise?

Dark? How about No Cournty for Old Men? Gone Baby Gone? There Will Be Blood? The Talented Mr. Ripley?

Relax. Disney ain't all Hannah Montana and Snow White. They do mature stuff, they just slap a brand like Touchstone or Miramax or Dimension on it and whistle in the other direction.

It's unlikely Disney bought Marvel to turn into another G-rated franchise. Rather, they want to dominate a market they don't yet: young males. Just as you can't turn on ABC without seeing some show about horny MILFs, you're unlikely to see Marvel Zombies go away--and that's unfortunate, because that dumb one-note joke played itself out a long, long, looooong time ago.

What we might see--and I for one hope this comes to pass--is a return to an emphasis on action. Comics today are overburdened with endless banter. And that's the result of producing comics that writers want to write rather than comics that readers want to read.
 
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Yes, but Disney acquired Marvel to have licenseable characters to sell to young boys (a market they're trying to tap into with more emphasis). As such, their products will undergo scrutiny from parents. The examples you mentioned (Kill Bill, Desperate Housewives, etc) aren't aimed at kids.
 

Yes, but Disney acquired Marvel to have licenseable characters to sell to young boys (a market they're trying to tap into with more emphasis). As such, their products will undergo scrutiny from parents.

Yes, but Marvel already sells to young boys (lots of things, from toys to sheets, underwear, and food), and has already passed such scrutiny. The brand is already proven acceptable to parents in its current form, and would therefore not need any new oversight or editing.
 

Yes, but Marvel already sells to young boys (lots of things, from toys to sheets, underwear, and food), and has already passed such scrutiny. The brand is already proven acceptable to parents in its current form, and would therefore not need any new oversight or editing.
The scrutiny Marvel undergoes right now is a speck when compared to what it'll see as part of Disney.

Most parents (and kids) know Spiderman and Wolverine from the cartoons, which paint a very different image from the comics. And Iron Man and Hulk are known from the movies (again, very different). The comics themselves are sold mostly to the 20+ crowd.
 

The scrutiny Marvel undergoes right now is a speck when compared to what it'll see as part of Disney.

Most parents (and kids) know Spiderman and Wolverine from the cartoons, which paint a very different image from the comics. And Iron Man and Hulk are known from the movies (again, very different). The comics themselves are sold mostly to the 20+ crowd.
Correct, the comics skew to an older audience than the cartoons. Disney, of course, wants to appeal to late-teen and twentysomething males as much as they want to appeal to tweeners, so why throw away that market? They might want to position a line of youth-friendly comics, but then again Marvel already has that in the form of their Marvel Adventures imprint (Power Pack is still around somehow). Notably, comics do have a rating system that distinguishes the kiddy fare from mature titles. We just tend to forget that because kids can't actually drive out to comic book specialty shops, much less find any titles they can afford with their allowances and paper-route money.

Honestly, to my tastes Marvel could use much more scrutiny than we're likely to see. All this dark stuff is mostly just enervating garbage. When I read in Wolverine comics about a death camp for mutants run by the U.S. government called "Neverland", I wonder who the hell this is supposed to appeal to. The "Saw" and "Hostel" crowd of murder-porn fans, I guess. And then the real kicker: after M-Day, what happens? Do superheroes show up and liberate the victims, avenge the dead, and punish the guilty? Nah, that would be too "Saturday-morning Punisher-meets-Archie", right? Instead, the entire camp's population is exterminated mercilessly and the perpetrators get off scott-free. The Beast eventually shows up and buries the bodies. Good times.

And remember Genosha, the mutant nation? Grant Morrison decided that a whole nation of mutants was too much, so he just had some big sentinel come in and kill 99% of them. Bravo.

See, those are examples of writing storylines that's caused the majority of fans--even diedhard ones like myself--to want to throw in the towel and just give up on comics altogether. Some writer like Mark Millar or Warren Ellis who gets off on writing ugly, nihilistic stories that only appeal to a tiny minority of folks--the 100,000 or so folks left who bother to visit a comics shop.

No more dreary, pessimistic crap like Marvel Zombies and Dark Reign? No more corpse-mound spectacles where we get to see a neverending stream of genocide, death camps, and other atrocities? Comics might actually go back to being fun, exciting, or (daresay) optimistic? Please, bring on this all-powerful amry of tut-tutting watchdog mothers who (supposedly) always manage to bend media companies to their will.

Like the Beatles said, things can only get better...because they couldn't get much worse.
 
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Ah, I can see it now-

Coming soon from Disney: Wolverine vs. The Punisher!

Yeah, right.

The comics will be unaffected. Everyone involved knows they're the idea factory. Let them take chances... 99% of it will be forgotten in 10 years, but 1% of the time you get something to make a movie franchise out of.

As for "Disney-fying" the movies... Marvel has been associated with exactly one R-rated movie and one M-rated game, neither of them did that well, and they had officially declared that "experiment" over before this even happened.

When all you make is PG and PG-13 movies, and Teen rated games, you're already Disney-fied.
 

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