Cable giant Comcast - the owner of NBC Universal - confirms its plans to try and outbid Disney’s offer for the assets of 21st Century Fox. Back in December of last year, a huge media deal that had been rumored as in the works for a while was finally made official: Disney was set to buy Fox, or at least a substantial portion of it. While a deal that huge takes years to fully complete, it also obviously wouldn’t have been publicly announced if both parties involved weren’t intending to proceed.
Disney wasn’t the only massive corporation that wanted to get a piece of Fox’s considerable assets though. Around the same time the House of Mouse was negotiating with Fox, so was Comcast. Comcast has of course long been one of the largest cable companies in the U.S., and became a full-on media monolith in and of itself when it acquired NBC Universal in 2011. As big a player as Disney is, Comcast is just as big.
As we all know now though, Comcast didn’t win the bidding war, eventually bowing out when it became clear that Fox had chosen to sell to Disney. However, there have been murmurings in the last few months that Comcast was preparing to try and once again outbid Disney, in a last minute attempt to acquire Fox. Sure enough, Deadline reports that Comcast has confirmed its plans to do just that.
The deal that Disney and Fox eventually settled on was one worth about $52 billion, a sizeable chunk of change, even to most giant corporations. Comcast reportedly plans to offer Fox an offer in the $60 billion range, and what’s more, this offer is an “all-cash” offer, while Disney’s is “all-stock.” While fully explaining why one is better than the other would require digging into the minutiae of corporate mergers and buyouts and is probably best left to financial experts, suffice it to say that all-cash is generally seen as being more attractive than all-stock, for various reasons.
That said, just because Comcast has returned with a beefed up, all-cash offer, doesn’t mean that Fox will be any more willing to sell to them than they were before. For evidence, one needs only remember that Comcast actually outbid Disney last time, making an all-stock offer worth considerably more than Disney’s all-stock offer. Yet, Fox still went with Disney. Presumably, the reasons it did that might still be valid, and no amount of increased money will change Fox’s mind.
If Comcast did end up winning the day though, and buying Fox’s movie and TV studio assets, one wonders what that would mean for the prospects of Fox’s Marvel characters being able to join Disney’s MCU. There is a widely held belief online that the movie and TV rights to characters such as the X-Men and Fantastic Four would revert to Marvel - and thus Disney - regardless of who Fox sells to, as the rights are non-transferable. However, this has in no way been confirmed by either Marvel or Fox, and honestly might be more wishful thinking by fans than anything.
More: Kevin Feige Confirms Disney-Fox Deal Won’t Affect MCU Films In Progress
Source: Deadline
