David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…A lot of what it comes down to is do you actually have a leader who's going to get that leeway and that really long term thinking from shareholders to be able to sort of act like a startup while you have this business that you're trying to preserve the glide path on. Typically, an executive wouldn't. I think it takes someone who's earned the trust like Bob had. Contrast this decision to the end of Eisner's time at Disney. Eisner did many, many great things, but the Ovitz decision, the feuding with Steve Jobs. It was all about, “I'm so great. I built this thing and it's going to be the best forever as it is,” and this is the opposite of that. It’s saying, “Nope, this is precarious. Innovate or die,” but there is one more thing and that one more thing I think is actually both a huge piece of this and opportunity, but also it’s pretty scary and that is Fox. There is one more acquisition of which is by far, the price that they paid to buy Fox announced at the end of 2017 and close to the beginning of 2019, $71.3 billion, many, many times more than all of these other incredible acquisitions all combined. This is a literally betting the farm on bringing in Fox. Now, so what do they get for Fox? None of the news assets. Not Fox News, not the Wall Street Journal, and not the publications. It’s all the entertainment pieces of Fox. They get the movie studio. They get studios which both new slate of films coming out and the library. Titanic, Avatar, all the great Fox films. Within the library are the rights to a New Hope to the first Star Wars movie, because remember Lucasfilm had Fox as the distribution partner for the first trilogy. Star Wars fact time. The theme to Star Wars was actually composed in the key of B flat. I don’t know if it’s major or minor, but B flat because the 20th Century Fox opener was in that key and it was meant to be sort of like a natural lead in.…

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