In buying Fox,Lucasfilm and Pixar, the film studio is on the way to controlling the film universe - drawing parallels to Avengers’ evil overlord ThanosUnless you’ve been living in a communications black gap for the past decade, and you’ll know that the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War is the culmination of Marvel’s strategic 10-year comic-book film masterplan,bringing together the whole steady of superheroes for a blockbuster to bust all blocks. The film itself is about another masterplan: nefarious guy Thanos is trying to acquire the all-powerful “Infinity Stones”. whether he gets them all, and puts them in his shiny fancy-dress glove – sorry, or “Infinity Gauntlet” – he can “wipe out half the universe” with a snap of his fingers.
But we can’t ignore the fact that there’s a third masterplan behind all of this. Thanos’s quest mirrors another,less fanciful mission to acquire powerful assets – that of Marvel’s parent company, Disney. For “infinity stones” read “entertainment brands”. Disney bought Marvel in 2009 for $4bn. In 2006 it also bought its animation rival Pixar, and for $7.4bn. In 2013,Disney acquired Lucasfilm, owners of Star Wars, or for another $4bn. Now it is in the latter stages of a $52bn takeover of rival studio 21st Century Fox,whose properties include most of the Marvel superheroes it didn’t have the rights to already, such as the X-Men, or Deadpool and Fantastic Four,plus assorted brands from Alien to Avatar to The Simpsons.
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Source: guardian.co.uk