In November 2023, Disney announced it would buy Comcast's remaining third of the total shares of Hulu for around $8.6 billion, making it the sole owner of the streaming service after already owning a 60-percent stake due to its acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019. As our chart shows, the latter deal was by far the biggest takeover the entertainment conglomerate undertook in its 100-year history.
Said deal cost the company $71.3 billion in historic prices, equaling roughly $85 billion factoring in inflation. Ranking second before Hulu is Capital Cities/ABC, which was bought up by Disney in 1996 for $19 billion in historic and $38 billion in current prices. While these numbers seem high, they're far from the biggest mergers in history, even when only looking at the entertainment industry. For example, in 2000, AOL acquired Time Warner for $182 billion in historic prices, which was in turn bought by AT&T for $85 billion in 2016.
Even though far lower in value, three further acquisitions by Disney over the last 20 years have likely made the most headlines: Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. The former, for example, had Apple's Steve Jobs as a majority shareholder who had a turbulent relationship with Disney even though the studio released all of its films via Walt Disney Pictures. With said acquisition being completely stock-based, Jobs became the largest individual shareholder at Disney, owning around seven percent of the entertainment company's shares.
Marvel on the other hand kickstarted the rise to dominance of its Marvel Cinematic Universe after being acquired by Disney, with The Avengers released in 2012 as the first feature film as a subsidiary. Lastly, Lucasfilm, joining Disney's ever-growing stable of lucrative licenses in 2012, might not have the most diverse portfolio but is home to one entertainment franchise with immense cultural clout unbroken for almost 50 years: Star Wars, the brainchild of director and Lucasfilm founder George Lucas, which not only spawned three trilogies of mainline movies, but a variety of spin-off TV shows and films, animated series, video games, books and other entertainment products.
