It might very confusing to some as to how HBO Max can hold onto movies such as X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The Mighty Ducks and even Alien when Disney went and took over Fox and should already own The Mighty Ducks. Licensing is the biggest reason that this is possible as Mansoor Mithaiwala of Screenrant explains, meaning that since HBO has been practicing third-party licensing for some time now and managed to grab hold of many movies in this manner that might have otherwise gone over to Disney+ by now. It’s not as though Disney+ is hurting for content really since they have plenty of movies, shows, and other material that people are currently enjoying, and there’s nothing to say that everything will eventually be headed their way. People might actually be interested to know that the fate of movie franchises such as Alien might actually be held at arm’s length since Disney is attempting to keep their streaming network family friendly and age appropriate, which the Alien series most definitely is not. But at one point or another it would make sense to allow several of the other movies that are essentially supposed to be under Disney’s ever-expanding umbrella of titles to ‘go home’. Which movies will actually make to Disney+ is hard to say, just as it’s hard to say when this will happen. But there are definitely fans that might be rejoicing to hear that Disney wants to stay as careful with the Alien franchise as possible since there were plenty of people willing to comment on what might happen once Disney took over Fox, which has plenty of properties that aren’t exactly geared for kids.
It’s still a question of what’s going to happen to the X-Men when Disney does decide to roll them out however since it’s pretty obvious what Sony did by powering a few of them down and limiting the effects of violence that were seen to basically CGI deaths that could be less gruesome. Does anyone remember the X-Men comics? Wolverine might have the worst reputation among the lot of them for being violent, but he wasn’t the only one that did some major damage. In recent years things have been looking up slightly, but there’s still a ways to go when it comes to equaling what Logan was able to do since the gore wasn’t so over the top as to be horrendous, but was far more real when people were actually bleeding after taking damage rather than taking a hit or a shot and then falling over thanks to an invisible bullet or blade that didn’t leave a mark. It feels safe to say that this is where Disney might be headed with the group since the overall bloody scenes that have been unveiled in the MCU have been pretty limited when some of the characters should have been trying to piece themselves back together at various points thanks to the hits they took.
There’s no need for excessive gore, but in handling things the way that’s been done it’s still kind of ‘meh’ when thinking of how effective the X-Men movies have been. True, Raven did perish in a very hard to watch sort of way in Dark Phoenix, but it definitely helped to create more of an emotional impact than having her be impaled and act as though the wound had magically healed around the jagged wood that ended her life. Now just imagine trying to go down the same path with Alien and the other movies that have made up the franchise. Just picture a chest-burster that comes busting out either off screen or without any real effect other than killing the person it came out of. It’s not quite the same, which means that Disney might eventually come up with a way to go hands off but keep the franchise alive. Andrew Rossow of Grit Daily has more to say on this. For the time being though people can still enjoy some of their favorite moves on HBO Max just as they are and hope like hell that nothing changes too much. As for the Disney movies it’s likely that one of these days they’ll return to Disney+, but until then there’s still plenty of content on the site to keep people busy and plenty more likely to come, so a couple other titles won’t be missed quite that much.
The streaming wars are bound to keep going for a while since more competitors started coming around, but as of now it still feels that Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and even Amazon are still holding things down when it comes to overall content and popularity. HBO Max still has some work to do in order to really become a serious competitor. But the chances are good that they’ll be giving the other sites a run sooner rather than later.
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