The murmurings had been going on for weeks, but on Thursday morning, it was official news: Disney bought rival studio 20th Century Fox in the most significant cataclysm for the film industry in the 21st century. For a princely sum of $66bn (in stock and debt), Disney CEO Bob Iger integrated Fox’s movie and TV production outfits, Fox Sports, FX Networks, some international assets, and hefty chunks of stock in such enterprises as Hulu and National Geographic. The biggest component not included in the deal was Fox News, which had moved to spin off into its own independent haven for conservatism prior to this deal.

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Many of the early reactions have revolved around the unprecedented pooling of intellectual property between the two companies. For years, complicated licensing laws have kept the Marvel stable of characters fractured in different movie universes forbidden from intersecting. In a prepared statement, Iger foregrounded the conjoining of the proper Marvel Cinematic Universe (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy) with the Fox portfolio. He proclaimed that this merger “provides Disney with the opportunity to reunite the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Deadpool with the Marvel family under one roof, and create richer, more complex worlds of inter-related characters and stories that audiences have shown they love.” This represents an explosion of possibility, in narrative terms; your longstanding fantasy of Wolverine exchanging banter with Spider-Man just took one huge leap towards reality. Hell, if they feel like it, Disney can make Wolverine kiss Darth Vader.

And that’s hardly the half of it. While not quite as geared towards conglomeration, plenty of other franchises will now fly under the Fox banner. James Cameron’s Avatar and its four planned sequels will take their gazillion-dollar budget from the Disney pot, in addition to other such properties as rival killing machines Alien and Predator, the Planet of the Apes pictures, and any further Independence Day follow-ups (though the dismal receipts on the most recent installment might make that possibility rather remote).

In purchasing the big tent of 20th Century Fox, Disney also gains dominion over its offshoot studios, two of which will interact with the existing Disney culture in unpredictable ways. For one, Fox owns animation studio Blue Sky Entertainment, the folks responsible for the unending stream of lucrative Ice Age sequels as well as the new Ferdinand. Variety’s report on the merger mentions that “Disney expects to realize $2bn in cost savings from combining Disney and Fox’s overlapping businesses within two years of the deal’s closing.” Could this be one of the redundancies that Disney, the reigning king of animation with both the Mouse House and Pixar under its thumb, hopes to eliminate?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oscar-buzzed fantasy The Shape of Water. Photograph: Kerry Hayes/AP

The other point of intrigue concerns Fox Searchlight Pictures, the distribution arm of Fox geared towards representing smaller-scale independent films. Over the past decade, this boutique outfit has grown into a reliable Oscar factory, scoring flashy best picture wins off Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave and Birdman. At the time of writing, The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri both jockey for prime placement in this year’s Oscars race. Grown-up awards recognition has long been one of the cap-feathers eluding Disney, as the corporation has mostly stuck to kiddie programming or softly-done dramas safe for the whole family. The inspirational and edgeless Queen of Katwe represents Disney’s most focused bid for a best picture horse in recent years, and came up dry at nomination time. As far as Searchlight goes, the question is now whether Disney will fold that prestige studio directly into their brand, or reshape it to fit in more snugly with the Mickey Mouse ethic.

This all may sound like a Big Bang of storytelling opportunities, an exciting breaking-down of arcane legal barriers to big-top entertainment. Scanning the online headlines would largely reaffirm this notion, as variations on “What Does the Disney-Fox Merger Mean For the Superheroes?” cropped up on most major sites. The roar was even louder on social media, where vast hordes of Disney and Marvel fans cheered the blood wedding of their favorite brands.

But a deal of this scale should give anyone subject to the turbulent tides of the US economy pause. Even before they became the largest media conglomerate in the world by a significant margin, Disney was already a shadowy corporate behemoth with unsettling business practices. It was just last month that Disney officially barred Los Angeles Times critics from their movie screenings as a punishment for unflattering reportage on the Walt Disney Co’s vampiric relationship to the city of Anaheim. After a thoroughly public shaming and solidarity-boycott threats from other major newspapers, Disney caved. All the same, that was but one frightening illustration of the sinister influence that a corporation drunk on its own power can wield.

Cinema is the art form most dependent on money, and lots of it; studios need to exist, if only because the titanically scaled blockbusters American audiences crave would be otherwise impossible. But now’s the time to start thinking about checks to authority and the hazards of monopoly, not whether we’ll get to watch Spider-Man make passionate love to a Na’vi. As tantalizing a prospect as Captain America Meets the Predator might be, the focus must remain on predators and Americans.