The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company was founded as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, and established itself as a leader in the American animation industry. The studio went from a pioneer in animation to a diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate, headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. Disney is the world's second largest media conglomerate in terms of revenue, after Alphabet. (Business insider) The main question is what makes Disney a billion-dollar multi-national company? The reason is simple. Disney realized to stay competitive with all the media businesses, buying out the competition and making them a subsidiary would be a good gamble which paid off for them. Disney was smart in their growth strategy and made investments in studios like Pixar, Lucasfilm and Marvel Entertainment and ultimately buying them out. The brilliant ideas and characters that Steve Jobs, George Lucas and Stan Lee were responsible for are now part of the House of Mouse; this opens up so many licensing opportunities ranging from movies to toys to theme park rides.

Even with all their subsidiaries there is always the chance for studios like Pixar or Marvel to fail. The reason Disney does not fail is they like to be hands off in their management style and let Pixar or Marvel create successful movies like Toy Story or Guardians of the Galaxy. They assign studio heads that have complete control over the specific subsidiary without direct interference from Disney. Disney’s main rival Fox, who owns some movie licenses for Marvel Properties, has a management style that is more hands on and this could be a reason why some of their Marvel Properties do good while others fail spectacularly like the Fantastic 4 movie. One of Disney’s biggest rivals is Time Warner who own Marvel’s biggest rival DC Comics. For years, they have been struggling to turn DC Entertainment into the box office juggernaut that Disney has made Marvel into but they keep