Bob Iger Defends Disney’s Pricey 2019 Fox Acquisition – Emmys, ‘Avatar’ Came From That Deal, “I Could Go On And On”

deadline.com:

Disney’s 2019 acquisition of most 20th Century Fox assets in a deal worth north of $71 billion enriched the Murdoch family but also swelled Disney’s debt and continues to have a mixed response from Wall Street.

On a call with analysts today after quarterly earnings, Bob Iger strongly defended the move as critical to completing Disney’s content and distribution heading into the streaming era. “In late 2017, when we announced initially that we were acquiring assets from 20th Century Fox, we specifically mentioned that we were doing so through the lens of streaming.

We saw a world where streaming was going to proliferate, and we knew we needed not only more content with but more distribution,” he said in response to a question about media consolidation. “And with that came just a tremendous amount of content.

When you talk about 60 Emmys, so much of that came from that acquisition. Or when we talk about Avatar, for instance, that came from that acquisition.