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Of course it is. The entire comicbook publishing industry is broken. Probably unfixably. And Disney, in any case, would hardly be interested in fixing it. Even at the best of times, the money made by comic publishing was probably less than Disney pays for office supplies.

The money is in the movies, the merchandise, and to some extent potential licensing. That is what Disney bought itself, not a piece of a dying industry.

Sure, Marvel Publishing is now a relatively small part of the huge Disney empire. But it's still a money-making business. I just don't see why Disney would dump a successful, proven revenue stream that's already in place. They don't have to fix anything - just deposit the checks that are currently coming in.

DC is owned by a conglomerate every bit as large as Disney, but they haven't stopped publishing comic books. And Marvel's market share is considerably higher than DC's.

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Again, the analogy fails. Warner already had a publishing arm. Disney doesn't. Keeping Marvel Comics going would require the bean counters at Disney to learn a whole new skill set.

Anyway -- I used to buy my DVDs at Tower Records. Tower was bought out -- and shut down, profitable or not.

Big Business is a different world from the one we know.

"They don't have to fix anything - just deposit the checks that are currently coming in."

Except now, the checks that are going out will also show up on Disney's bottom line.  And that's in addition to the 4 billion dollar cost of buying the company in the first place.

Mike

The problem is not the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" argument, but why would Disney overpay for the Marvel properties. It seems that when Disney made acquisitions of this sort it was the absorption of a competitor.

i.e.

Muppets (2004) Somebody send out a search-party for these guys, America's Got Talent show notwithstanding.

Pixar (2006) Pixar was attempting to break away, not happy with Disney's distribution deal. Disney made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Now Marvel, the fact that Marvel apparently makes money isn't the issue, the issue is that Disney wants to make MORE money with the characters than Marvel currently does. Up front Disney stated that with these characters they were going to target Male Teens. Well, Joey da Q doesn't believe teens buy comics, so, I think he's toast. Plus that fact that with Disney Publishing with worldwide distribution, they won't need the direct sales market and may pull out very soon. I think they'll make an attempt with Marvel under a new Editor in Chief. If it doesn't work, shut down Marvel, keep the name, license the characters out and distribute them under the Marvel letterhead.

And then there's the movies....

I'm probably wrong but that's the way I see it.

Tim O'Neill wrote:

Who is "MHC", Dan?

Sorry for the lack of clarity, Tim.  MHC = Mile High Comics.  The text I posted is from Chuck Rozanski's weekly newsletter.

QUOTE: And there's that bizarro economics again! Currently, Disney is not making one single cent off Marvel Comics, the publishing house. If they shut down the publishing house following the completion of this acquisition, they will still be making not one single cent off Marvel Comics the publishing house. There is no "loss". What percentage of the $4,000,000,000 this deal is supposedly costing Disney do you think they expect to recoup from publishing comics?

$125 million in 2007 about the same in 2008, and $32 million in the 2nd quarter of this year (sources posted earlier in this thread).

While it's not as much money as they make from a Spider-Man film, it's a sizeable source of new income for Disney.

Importantly, Marvel's a print publisher actually breaking away from the rest of print industry, operating at an incredible profit margin of 40%. As they're in the print business themselves as the numbe rone publisher of children's books in the world, you can bet they're not going to want to mess up something that turns that kind of profit in today's economy.

"Like someone elese said Disney did such a GREAT JOB with the Muppets franchise they are just everywhere"

I would suspect that one of the things that happened with the Muppets is that people within Disney viewed them as competitors to original Disney material, even AFTER they owned the Muppets.  When Vince McMahon won the pro wrestling wars and bought his main rival WCW, he ran an Invasion storyline where wrestlers from other promotions "invaded" and took on WWF stars.  It's something wrestling fans had been dying to see for over 20 years.  Yet, Vince completely botched the storyline and cost himself millions of dollars because he simply couldn't stand the idea of letting the other wrestling brands and their wrestlers look like they were equal to or better than the WWF.  He basically threw away money so he could make WWF look better than other wrestling promotions, even though Vince also owned the other promotions.

Mike

Keeping Marvel Comics going would require the bean counters at Disney to learn a whole new skill set.

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Hey now I am a bean counter!  I am sure if you give me enough numbers that I could make it work out real well for everyone involved.  =)