Black Streak Entertainment Blog: comic

The Disney Pop Culture Takeover - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Let’s face it, Disney owns the entertainment industry. When you turn on the TV, chances are you’re watching a Disney owned network and/or produced show. The same applies to movies. I bet Mickey owns quite a few movie studios that you never knew he had his grubby balloon-esque hands all over. With the purchasing of Marvel and Lucas Film, however, Disney has charged full-force into a realm that the company has never tread before - pop-culture. Is this overtake of the pop-culture scene by an overwhelmingly wealthy entertainment giant a good thing? Here is the way I see it:

The Good

Disney has money, A LOT OF MONEY. Therefore, they are able to take a vast universe such as Marvel, and do with it what no other movie studio has dared to even dream of doing, that is, throwing billions of dollars into super-hero properties and turning them into cutting-edge films that share the same storylines and universe as a whole.

The way that Disney and Marvel Studios have linked together their big screen films and Television shows (yes, I said shows - there’s a new one that they managed to pull out of the air that’s coming soon) astonishes me and makes me hungry for more! But not too much, which leads me to…

The Bad

Disney has money, A LOT OF MONEY (is there an echo in the room?). When people get a lot of money, they do stupid things with that money. Corporations are no different. I fear that Disney will beat both Marvel and Star Wars to death before the decade is over. Over exposure can be a bad thing, even if it does include lightsaber fights and the Hulk smashing everything is sight.

The Ugly

The Disney pop-culture overtake makes it extremely hard on the competition to compete. And where there is no competition, the corporation on top feels they can do no wrong, and that’s where franchises and properties are ruined. Not only that, but Marvel and Star Wars properties basically account for the majority of the licensed products on the market. Think about it, Star Wars and Marvel characters are on clothing, LEGOS, video games, comics, books, cartoons, food items, housewares and countless other goods and products. Disney knows that Star Wars and Marvel are powerful brands, which is why they dished out ridiculous amounts of money to own them.

But when one company owns two properties that are so high in consumer demand, it makes things hard on the little guys like Black Streak Entertainment to find companies that are willing to place our characters and our properties on their products. As I stated in “The Bad”, over-exposure can be a bad thing, both for consumers who are tired of seeing the same ol’ Marvel and Star Wars stuff on every product in a store, and for upcoming entertainment brands, like Black Streak, who constantly get rejected by product manufacturers because we aren’t as recognizable as Marvel or Disney.