With the Disney/Fox deal in the books, it’s just up to regulators now to give it the final stamp of approval, and it means a sea of change in Hollywood. The mouse house now has a plethora of major league properties under their roof. For a studio that carefully manages a small, generally single digit amount of movie releases per year, it means that there are going to be some hard decisions about what projects move forward, and which get canned. For X-Men fans, it means efforts like the upcoming, genre-y one-off “New Mutants” might be short-lived.
Simply put, Disney will be evaluating everything in development, and the question is whether small, riskier superhero takes have space within a company that demands four-quadrant home runs each time out.
“If Disney is an NFL team, then every movie on the calendar is like a Heisman Trophy winner. This raises the bar of what is a theatrical release,” an insider told THR.
So, one wonders what will become of the proposed “New Mutants” trilogy, or even “Gambit” starring Channing Tatum — does it have enough ingredients to be considered something in Disney’s blockbuster wheelhouse? The terrain becomes even more competitive when you consider that Kevin Feige has said that Marvel he already has twenty more movies on deck, and while some will certainly slide over with X-Men at his disposal, he has proven very thoughtful about how these characters are deployed. Most crucially, whatever plans Simon Kinberg, longtime franchise producer and director of next year’s “X-Men: Dark Phoenix,” had been laying down, will likely get overhauled.
Across the board, there is a mood from Disney of being very selective about how they roll out Fox properties on the big screen — if they decide to at all.
“Basically Fox — 20th Century Fox Studios — has some interesting tentpole opportunities, we obviously are going to continue to support that,” Bob Iger told investors last week (via CBR). “What they’ve done obviously with ‘Avatar,’ and what they did with ‘Deadpool,’ ‘X-Men,’ ‘Fantastic Four,’ ‘Planet of the Apes‘ is another one. We’ll stay in that business. Not all of it will be branded anything other than what it’s branded today, as for instance. How much we will create under that banner, we’re still uncertain. It’s going to take a while from a regulatory perspective. They’ll continue to develop in that period of time and at such time as we close this deal and have control, we’ll take stock and really look carefully at what their slate looks like going forward and how many movies it would make sense to make.”
Of course, Disney is already invested in “Avatar” thanks for their theme park attractions. However, you’ll notice there was no mention at all of “Alien” — the very R-rated series that Ridley Scott has been desperate to revive. But, there may be another avenue for Disney to roll out smaller, riskier projects — direct to their planned streaming service. The LA Times notes that the studio is already planning to make four to five movies per year for their upcoming platform, so maybe that’s where projects like “New Mutants” can continue to evolve.
It’ll certainly be an interesting year ahead as we see Disney absorb Fox, and what becomes of the many brands under its roof.