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If you can't beat 'em, buy em: Disney makes deal with (and buys 2% of) Webtoon
The plan seems to be to build a single digital comics platform for all of Marvel, Disney, and Star Wars comics.
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For years, Disney and Marvel have been working to try to do what Shonen Jump managed years ago – make a digital comics app that people actually want to pay for. Well, Disney apparently has finally found a solution. No, they’re not making Marvel Unlimited better or more affordable; they’re buying a portion of Webtoon Entertainment and creating a new digital comics platform with them.
Webtoon, you might remember, are home to thousands of webcomics, including manga, Marvel, and DC spin-offs. This new venture seems to be aimed at consolidating the various properties that Disney has acquired through corporate mergers into a single service. We don’t have a release date or even a title for the new platform, but we do know that it is meant to include comics from the Marvel, Star Wars, Disney, Pixar, and 20th Century Studios lines, along with a selection of Webtoon original stories.
Along with this new joint venture, Disney has put in a bid to buy 2% of Webtoon Entertainment. That could be interesting for DC titles such as Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, which are currently hosted on the Webtoon service. This stake doesn’t give Disney outright ownership of Webtoon, but it does make it more likely that Marvel’s direct competition won’t be on Webtoon for much longer.
The key factor here is likely to be price point. How much are Disney and Webtoon going to charge for access to the reportedly 35,000 titles they plan to put on their new digital comics platform? If they can keep it low, like the Shonen Jump app has for the past several years, it could entice more fans to dip in to catch up on the wealth of comics they are offering.
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