After more than a year of deliberation, The Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox is official as of 12:02 a.m. EDT on March 20, 2019. The massive deal, in which Disney acquired most of Fox’s film and television production and distribution businesses for $71.3 billion in cash and stock, will have countless, far-reaching implications for the media and entertainment industries. The most obvious one is that Disney has taken control of the biggest back catalogs in entertainment: 20th Century Fox’s film archive, and 20th Century Fox Television’s well of TV shows.

As one of the “Big Six” Hollywood studios, Fox has been around for a long, long time. The film studio was founded in 1935 as 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation; the company spun up a TV division called TCF Television Productions in 1949. Over the decades, Fox has produced dozens of box office hits and long-running TV shows — and now, Disney owns them all, adding to its acquisitions of Marvel Entertainment in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012.

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Comics fans have focused on the deal allowing Disney to bring a few leftover Marvel characters and Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope (including the 20th Century Fox fanfare) into the fold. But an acquisition like this also involves tons of film and television properties, ranging from billion-dollar franchises to things you’ve never heard of.

Note that in the film segment, the deal includes Fox’s moviemaking apparatus as well as its distribution business. On the TV side, 21st Century Fox spun out all the assets that Disney didn’t or couldn’t acquire — the Fox broadcast network, owned and operated Fox affiliate news stations, the Fox News group (including Fox Business), and the Fox Sports group — into a new stand-alone company called the Fox Corporation (aka “New Fox”).

But the way the TV industry works, production studios regularly make shows that air on other networks, so Fox-produced shows could still appear on channels that Disney didn’t own. Disney will control the rights to the real future of all of these properties: streaming distribution.

Here’s a closer look at what the monolithic Disney now has at its disposal.

Marvel and Star Wars

Yes, Disney’s acquisition gives the company full ownership of the Marvel characters that were previously under Fox’s banner — Deadpool, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. The companies have shared the screen rights for two additional Marvel characters: Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, whose comic book origins lie in both the Avengers and X-Men series.

This opens the door for, say, the X-Men to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And once the current phase of the MCU concludes with Avengers: Endgame next month, Marvel Studios would be able to bring in new villains like Doctor Doom and Galactus.

Shifting to a different universe of genre film, the deal gives Disney the one piece of the Star Wars puzzle that it didn’t acquire when it bought Lucasfilm. Fox’s original arrangement with George Lucas included the exclusive distribution rights to Star Wars (which was later renamed Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope) in perpetuity.

With the rights secured, there’s a chance that Disney could put together a modern home video release of A New Hope — the original theatrical cut from 1977, not the special editions with Lucas’ much-maligned alterations, which is currently the only option. Purists can download the unofficial “Despecialized Edition” of the original Star Wars trilogy, but a fan edit, amazing as it might be, just isn’t the same as being able to walk into a store and buy a Blu-ray copy.

There’s also the matter of the 20th Century Fox fanfare, which accompanied the first six Star Wars films. The movies under Disney — 2015’s The Force Awakens, 2016’s Rogue One, 2017’s The Last Jedi, and 2018’s Solo — open with a silent Lucasfilm logo. It remains to be seen whether Disney will bring back Fox’s iconic percussion-and-brass theme for future Star Wars films.

A titanic film library

Fox has built up an impressive movie library over more than 80 years. Looking to the future, the Avatar franchise may be the crown jewel in Disney’s acquisition of the Fox film studio. The original film, which was released in 2009, remains the highest-grossing movie of all time, with $2.79 billion in worldwide box office receipts. Four sequels are in development, with release dates scheduled from 2021 through 2025.

In 2016, Fox released a sequel to Independence Day two decades after its debut. The year afterward, the company concluded its successful Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy with the well-received War for the Planet of the Apes, and released the latest Alien film, Alien: Covenant. Fox followed it up with the fourth Predator movie, The Predator, in 2018.

Looking into Fox’s back catalog, there are a number of other well-known franchises that Disney has acquired, including Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Die Hard, Home Alone, and Night at the Museum. And on the animation front, 20th Century Fox Animation owns Blue Sky Studios — the production house behind the Ice Age and Rio franchises — as well as the live-action/CGI hybrid series Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The deal comes with more than tentpole blockbusters, of course. Disney now owns Fox Searchlight Pictures, the indie-focused arm of 20th Century Fox, which has won four Best Picture Oscars in the past decade. (Believe it or not, no Disney film has ever taken the top prize at the Academy Awards.)

A big Modern Family

Acquiring Fox’s television studios gives Disney a major boost to its TV production capabilities. Disney hasn’t been as successful as Fox on the programming front lately, and one of its most beloved and reliable creators — Shonda Rhimes, the woman behind Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal — left ABC Studios for Netflix in 2017.

One of ABC’s longest-running hits, Modern Family, is actually produced by 20th Century Fox Television; one of its newest, Speechless, is a co-production between Fox and ABC. Other popular network shows from Fox include This Is Us, which airs on NBC, and Empire, which appears on Fox. That channel also broadcasts Fox-produced shows such as The Gifted, which is a live-action series based on the X-Men, and the revival of The X-Files.

20th Century Fox Television has a subsidiary, Fox 21 Television Studios, that primarily makes programming for cable channels. Fox 21 has a hand in Showtime’s Homeland and FX’s American Horror Story, among many other shows. Disney also acquired FX Networks in this deal, including the channels FX, FXX, and FXM, as well as the studio FX Productions. That company makes Fox’s second X-Men show, Legion, along with acclaimed series such as Atlanta and Better Things. Shows in the works include adaptations of Y: The Last Man and James Clavell’s Shōgun.

The other subsidiary of 20th Century Fox Television is Fox Television Animation, which, of course, makes animated TV series such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers. The firm’s library includes American Dad!, Futurama, and King of the Hill.

Disney now owns the production apparatus behind all of those series, as well as the production and distribution rights to Fox’s widely varied back catalog, which includes beloved shows such as 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hill Street Blues, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Shield.

Streaming is the future

All of those Fox films and television shows make for a giant expansion of Disney’s already formidable library of intellectual property, and a lot more fodder for Hollywood’s favorite practice: reboots of things people once loved. But Disney CEO Bob Iger has stressed that the company is looking ahead to a future where people increasingly get their entertainment over the internet rather than through a cable box — and that’s what the Fox acquisition is really all about.

The deal gives Disney 60 percent ownership of Hulu, the streaming service that is primarily known for hosting currently airing TV shows from numerous networks. That’s separate from Disney’s own massive streaming ambitions. ESPN Plus, which offers sports programming beyond what’s available via ESPN’s existing TV channels, debuted in April 2018. And Disney is planning to launch Disney Plus — a home for all-ages content from Disney, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar, as well as “the entire Disney motion picture library” — in fall 2019.

The Fox acquisition provides a massive influx of content that Disney can use to bolster its streaming platforms as well as its linear TV channels. Franchises like Star Wars and Toy Story are attractive on their own, of course, but Disney Plus will be even more viable if Disney decides to add other desirable TV shows and films from Fox’s considerable library.