What Disney Is Not Selling… And Why
Pixar was at the time an excellent acquisition for Disney. Sure computer animated characters were new but there was no real problem fitting them into Disney’s existing pantheon. In the last Wreck-It Ralph movie there was a gag with a Disney princess’s green room and no one could understand Merida’s accent because “she is from the other studio.” But Merida, Woody, and Lightening have no trouble fitting into the Disney-shared universe.
And there effectively is a Disney-shared universe. You can have Cruella, Captain Hook, and Doctor Facillier all sharing the same table in Mickey’s House of Villains and it works.
But if Darth Vader and Thanos ask if they can join them, there is a bunch of awkward side glances around the table. Star Wars and Marvel have never integrated into Disney’s universe. They were both odd grafts that never really took.
Star Wars was at first thought to be an easier fit because there had been a ride at Hollywood Studios for decades. But that was an exception because Hollywood Studio has never quite fit in at Disney World either. It was one of Michael Eisner’s ME TOO ideas which I would now take in a heartbeat over anything popping out of Iger’s head.
Nonetheless, while it is not hard to make the case that neither LucasFilm nor Marvel are genuinely core Disney properties, neither one will be up for sale.
Darklings: But you said Disney needs billions. Aren’t they worth billions?
Well, that is a very good question. Let’s take a look at it.
We will start by taking Star Wars off the table so we can approach this question like a dispassionate executive.
Mammoth Studios called you with an offer to sell a franchise they bought ten years ago: Glarbert the Star Pirate. Glarbert was huge in the late 70s and early 80s, heck, it was a pop culture earthquake forty years ago. But that was 40 years ago. Still, the creator of Glarbert launched a very successful revival in the early 00s. However, the creator was getting on in years by the 2010s and decided to sell. Mammoth’s first Glarbert movie hauled in $2 billion, so the franchise appeared to be quite healthy. But the second movie didn’t do as well at $1.3 billion. The third pulled in $1.07 billion. Which would have been okay but Mammoth spent $500 million on it (even if they claimed it was only $250 million) plus another $150 million in marketing and that was in 2019 bucks.
There was a Glarbert spinoff series on Mammoth+, Bilhap the Glarbarian, which was initially very successful. But other spinoffs haven’t had Bilhaps’s success and the latest season of Bilhap the Glarbarian tanked in the streaming numbers too.
Assuming you were even willing to put down money on it, how much would you be willing to pay for an out-of-gas property like Glarbert?
Wallstreet analysts have put the worth of LucasFilm at (drumroll please):
$1 billion.
And for those of you rushing to your keyboard to type, “I wouldn’t even be paying that!” Remember Lucasfilm ain’t just media and toys. LucasFilm comes with Industrial Light and Magic, plus Skywalker Sound and the majority stake in THX. That is where they are getting that $1 billion figure from.
The low, low price is the biggest reason Iger can’t sell LucasFilm. Yes, LucasFilm is now deeply integrated into Disney’s business structure and it would take an army of lawyers to sever all the ties but the big problem is that Iger paid $4.05 billion for it ten years ago.
It should be worth at least $7 billion today. Instead, it’s worth $1 billion.
LucasFilm is not only not worth selling at the price that any sane executive would be willing to pay for it, but this will also constitute public admission of Disney’s horrendous mismanagement of the property.
And LucasFilm is the good news. Marvel Films isn’t in anywhere near as good a shape. At this point, any potential buyer is looking at a film company that has a pipeline of underperforming and unproven franchises trying to ride off of previous successes. No proprietary technology worth having and it is now quietly viewed as having killed the superhero craze. the IPs aren’t worth $1 billion at this point.
Iger paid $4 billion for it, granted it did make a profit for Disney which LucasFilm did not.
Even if it was easy to sever these relationships and it really isn’t (I think it could take years) it doesn’t matter because Bob Iger can’t sell them without publically admitting his abject failure.
