Looks like Spider-Man and the X-Men will be joining Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck pretty soon.

Walt Disney Co. just announced that it will be buying Marvel Entertainment along with more than 5,000 Marvel comic book characters including Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four for $4 billion dollars, as was reported by the Chicago Tribune today.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Disney Co. President Bob Iger explained that the acquisition of Marvel Entertainment, who popularized many of the comic book super heroes we love today, was a strategy to attract more boys to the Disney brand. Iger added that Disney would not be re-branding the Marvel characters as Disney ones, but would try to find ways to popularize other characters that are less well-known instead.

Under the terms of the acquisition, shareholders of Marvel Entertainment would each receive $30/share in cash, along with 0.745 Disney shares for every Marvel share that the shareholders own. Therefore, basing on Disney’s stock closing price last Friday, August 28, the transaction value of the acquisition amounted to $50 per share, which adds up to a total of $4 billion. The deal is said to be completed by the end of this year.

With the current acquisition underway, Iger also adds that he’s particularly interested on how Marvel continues to successfully convert their comic book super-heroes and other characters onto the big screen.

“Over the last decade, [Marvel CEO] Ike Perlmutter and his team have done a terrific job building a licensing, publishing and movie business around such great Marvel characters as Iron Man, Spider-Man and the X-Men, to name a few.”

“ In particular, they have shown a tremendous skill in increasing the appeal of characters like Iron Man that traditionally weren’t well known outside Marvel’s core fan community, and we believe there is significant opportunity to mine Marvel’s rich intellectual property portfolio.” Iger was quoted as saying.

Prior to the acquisition, Marvel already had several agreements in place with various companies, which included movie deals with Sony, Fox and Paramount for Marvel characters such as Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Thor, & Captain America. These agreements will still hold and will remain to be honored until their terms expire.

Before Marvel Entertainment, Disney’s most recent purchase was that of Pixar Animation Studios Inc., which was bought for $7.4 billion in 2006.

Source: Chicago Tribune

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