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Disney’s Acquisition of Marvel

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Disney’s Acquisition of Marvel

The Walt Disney Company (“Disney”) is one the most recognized and powerful brand names in the entertainment industry according to Datamonitor 2007. This is their biggest competitive advantage, combined with the fact that they hold a strategic array of assets (world’s largest media conglomerate) that helps the company to fully-exploit characters.

On the other hand, Marvel’s biggest competitive advantages are both intangible assets: their intellectual property (characters like Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men, etc.) and their creative potential (development of new characters).

With the acquisition, Marvel will now serve as a source of “raw materials” for Disney’s businesses (theme parks, cartoons, movies, toys, etc.) while Marvel will benefit thanks to the capabilities of Disney’s advertising. Now with Disney and Marvel combined, they have eliminated Warner’s competitive advantage of having a Comic Studio backwards integrated to their corporation, which guarantees a continuous flow of exploitable material (characters). Nonetheless, Disney holds a notable competitive advantage over their competitor: they are more diversified: they have theme parks, consumer products and interactive media.

Currently Disney is facing some critical issues after the acquisition, and they are:
- Marvel’s most famous characters are compromised to Disney’s rivals.
- Some of Disney’s main characters are out-dated (Pinocchio, Mickey-Mouse, Donald Duck, etc.).
- Marvel could lose their identity (creative power) by the “take-over by a company associated with princesses and fairies” –Chmielewski & Fritz, 2009. It also good to point out that Marvel’s biggest creative asset is Stan Lee, now 89 years old.

The recommendations are the following:
On the functional level, Marvel’s legal department should focus on terminating as many contracts as possible,

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