21st Century Disney

The deal is done:

Walt Disney Co. completed its $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox Inc.’s entertainments assets, and now must get to the task of squeezing out promised cost savings. ...

The deal is one of the most dramatic in the current wave of entertainment-industry mergers, shrinking the number of major Hollywood studios to five from six and putting the irreverent Homer Simpson and “Family Guy” in the same stable of cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. ...

The Fox film studios began in 1915 under the leadership of businessman William Fox. By the late 1920s, Fox Film Corporation was a dominant player in Hollywood, and William Fox came close to taking over M-G-M dominated the industry and its CEO came very close to taking over M-G-M. But then the stock market collapsed, William Fox lost most of his fortune AND control of the Fox Film Corporation, and five years later the Fox Film Corporation merged withan upstart film company called 20th Century Pictures, founded and led by the hard-charging Darryl F. Zanuck.

There were ups and downs for 20th Century Fox after the merger, what with sell-offs of backlots, the start of a TV network, the takeover by an Australian newspaper mogul named Murdoch. But today the 104-year-old company was officially eaten my an entertainment conglomerate who's company logo is a mouth.

And the fact that th Walt Disney Company swallowed a major 104-year-old film company ... and most of its subsidies ... whole is jaw-dropping when you focus on it. Because Disney started in a Hollywood garage, amost went bankrupt before World War II, was still a minor player in the 1970s and had to fight off a hostile takeover in the 1980s. And yet today it's the largest entertainment behemoth in the world, operating amusement parks, a half-dozen animation studios, multiple live-action facilities. It's two parts movies and television, one part tech, three parts real estate.

And now it's the Godzilla of all media.