The Walt Disney Company has just acquired Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. This means that Disney now has exclusive ownership of all of Marvel’s superhero characters – which might cause problems for Universal Studios theme parks.
Universal has the Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando and an entire piece of the park is based off of the Marvel characters.
Do you think that Disney will allow Universal the rights to use the Marvel characters, or do you think that Disney will create a new section in its own park for the characters and force Universal to close down its comic book superhero rides?
If Disney lets Universal use the characters they would require some serious money to do so. What do you think Universal should do?
Image Via Flickr
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They had a great article about this in the USA today.
The “amusment parks” section explains it pretty well:
Ugh, guess the link didn’t post. Basically, disney has NO SAY right now in the use of Spiderman, etc. While the characters themselves are licensed to Marvel, the rights to use the characters in rides, at least in the state of Florida, are currently held by Universal.
So at least until the current contract is up, the rides will continue at IoA. I’m not sure how long that current contract is, but I believe it’s like 5-10 more years.
After that, you are right that Disney would probably require Universal to pay for usage.
But even if Disney decides to buy the rights to use the characters in its parks in the US, quite a few Disney insiders are saying don’t expect them to actually start building Spiderman/X-Men/etc rides at Disney World/Disney Land.