Key Points
- Acquired's Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal analyzed Disney's strategy in the WSJ.
- The core playbook: buy the best IP, then own distribution.
- Disney bought Pixar (2006), Marvel (2009), Lucasfilm (2012), and Fox (2019).
- BAMTech (2017) gave Disney the streaming spine for Disney+.
The hosts of Acquired, the marathon business-history podcast, distilled Disney's empire to a single playbook in a new Wall Street Journal feature: buy the best intellectual property in the world, then own how it reaches people. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal frame Disney as a company that compounds first by acquisition, then by distribution.
The receipts are the deals. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 (about $7.4 billion), Marvel in 2009 (about $4 billion), Lucasfilm in 2012 (about $4 billion), and 21st Century Fox in 2019 ($71.3 billion), assembling the most valuable character library on earth. The under-discussed move, per Acquired, was BAMTech in 2017 — the streaming-tech backbone that became Disney+ and let Disney sell that IP directly instead of renting shelf space from theaters and cable. It's the same flywheel now powering Toy Story 5's box office.
Sources: Wikipedia: The Walt Disney Company, Wikipedia: Acquired
The strategy now runs in reverse as well: Disney is selling its 50% A+E Global Media stake to Hearst for more than $1 billion, its first major step in shrinking its traditional TV footprint.
Comments