Disney and CorpSeCorp Dominating the World? Could Be More Likely Than You Think by Jessica Stormoen5/3/2018 The Disney company has been slowly consuming other, smaller companies from Lucas Films to their most recent purchase, Fox. The acquisition of a large portion of Fox’s assets and studios adds to their already extensive assortment of studio assets, affirming that the Disney company is a media empire. This does cause concern in how similar it sounds to the start of CorpSeCorps, a fictitious corporate conglomerate in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood. One of the protagonists, Toby, details CorpSeCorps rise to power, noting that “they’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations, but then they’d taken over when the local police forces collapsed for lack of funding, and people liked that at first because the Corporations paid, but now CorpSeCorps were sending their tentacles everywhere” (Atwood, 25). CorpSeCorps started small by helping and supplying smaller, more local industries that were unable to support themselves, and then started to reach into other areas, like healthcare. CorpSeCorps growth from minor purchases to more large-scale assets as they gained the means to do so, this is similar to the way most companies rise to power, it is nothing unheard of on the surface, but in the world Atwood depicts CorpSeCorps does not stop. Their interest in power and wealth did not stop at just companies, they absorbed healthcare in the form of HelthWyzer, a pharmaceutical company as well as the healthcare provider. CorpSeCorps also consumed all forms of government, at least that is what is implied when Toby states that “the CorpSeCorps outlawed firearms” (Atwood, 24). CorpSeCorps create and enforced the laws, they are the only authority in The Year of the Flood. They have taken over every facet of power that they could get their hands on, this is not dissimilar to Disney.
The Disney company has a history of beating its direct competition and has been stretching out into different markets. They were able to beat out the Fleischer Studios, an animation company that took a much darker and adult edgy than their counterpart (Silver). Disney was able to become the main studio for animation, especially feature length films, and through this studio rivalry they came out stronger. Disney used this momentum to merge with Pixar Studios and other media studios and companies. Disney’s acquisition of Fox has diversified the Disney portfolio even more with the addition of “Fox’s movie and television studios, regional sports networks and international holdings” (BBC). Disney is now branching out into ESPN and Hulu, two markets that are different from the brand that Disney has built. ESPN and Hulu are a new step forward for Disney, showing that they are ready to start acquiring more than what their original brand limited them to. CorpSeCorps and Disney are similar in their progression towards dominating the markets they started in and then branching out. Disney may be working a bit slower than CorpSeCorps, and they may be trying to control the media and not security, but their paths have similarities. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood: a Novel. Anchor Books, a Division of Random House Inc., 2017. Silver, Charles. “MoMA | Disney, Iwerks, and Fleischer in the 1930s.” InsideOut, 8 Feb. 2011, www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/02/08/disney-iwerks-and-fleischer-in-the-1930s/. “Walt Disney Buys Murdoch's Fox for $52bn.” BBC News, BBC, 14 Dec. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/business-42353545.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Dr. PolakWrangler of the attendant ne'er-do-wells. Archives
May 2018
Categories |