Not so fast.
That’s what media conglomerate Comcast is saying to the Walt Disney Company, which reached a deal last December to buy the majority of assets belonging to Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion.
Today, Comcast, which also owns NBCUniversal, made an offer that tops Disney’s bid by around $13 billion. Comcast’s $65 billion all-cash deal sets up a potential bidding war between itself and Disney, both of whom are trying to replace sagging cable subscriptions with new content libraries (20th Century Fox/FX Networks), as well as gain other valuable assets like a 30% stake in Hulu, a nearly 40% stake in European pay tv operator Sky, and access to the Indian market through Star, a media company that reaches hundreds of millions of people in that region every month. (To put the scale of this deal into perspective, remember that Disney paid only $15.5 billion for Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel combined.)
