In case you haven’t noticed, Disney owns a lot of movie franchises and that can get a little confusing sometimes. From their recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox to their longtime partnership with Pixar Animation Studios, they’ve got a ton under their control. Don’t worry though; we’re here to help sort things out with a list of the major movie production studios that Disney currently owns and clarification on which franchises that gives them the rights to.
Starting with the most obvious, Disney owns The Walt Disney Studios. This might sound funny, but the point is that Disney owns plenty of franchises all on their own. Not only does their home studio include things like Mickey Mouse and friends, it also has control over the Disney princesses, from Ariel to Jasmine, to newer creations like Rapunzel of Tangled and Moana from the movie of the same name. Peter Pan, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and more are all housed in Disney’s home studio. You’ve seen them, you know them, you love them.
One step away from this rock solid base is, of course, Pixar Animation Studios. This includes everything from Toy Story to Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, Wall-E, A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, Cars, Inside Out, Up, Coco, The Good Dinosaur, everything. They even have the little unrelated shorts from before those movies, like Geri’s Game and Presto.
More than just those two, Disney has now also owned a little company called Lucasfilm Ltd. since 2012. For the uninformed, that means Disney owns Star Wars, which is a massive franchise. Every single spinoff and side character in the entire galaxy far, far away is at Disney’s disposal.
Disney also owns Marvel due to a deal made a little further back in 2009. Yes, THE Marvel, the comic book empire which has in the past years become a cinematic universe as well. Disney owns Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hawkeye, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, and everyone associated with them. Technically, Universal is keeping its death grip on the rights to doing another solo Hulk movie, but Disney found a way to get around that with a loophole by featuring him in stuff like Age of Ultron and Thor: Ragnarok anyway. Disney shares Spider-Man with Sony too, but everyone knows that Disney is the one who has control over Spidey himself now that his own solo movie is part of the MCU.
What’s more, Disney has also recently acquired the rights to make the next X-Men and Deadpool movies from Fox, meaning that the Marvel Cinematic Universe they’ve already made huge is about to get just a little bit more gigantic. They’ve even got a distribution studio under their control called Touchstone Pictures that’s used to releasing more mature films, meaning that they’ll be able to keep Deadpool as R rated in the MCU without much trouble, and in fact, they plan to do just that. In addition, the Avatar and Fantastic Four franchises now also fall under Disney, so the future is bright indeed.
Hopefully that should clear things up. To clarify just in case, the summarized version is that Disney currently owns its own home studio, Pixar, Lucasfilms, Marvel, and some properties from Sony and Fox along with a more adult studio called Touchstone Pictures. With all this on Disney’s utility belt, the question we have to ask now is this: who’s next in line for a little bit of Disney magic?
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