For anyone who has played the board game Monopoly, it is accepted that there comes a time in which a player who has gotten ahead and gained enough money just starts buying everything, regardless of their actual necessary value to that player, leaving everyone else to just wait to lose so the game can be over. If the player who did this was also an anamorphic mouse in red shots, it would be an accurate representation of the entertainment industry.

This article is neither intended to condemn or praise Disney for its accomplishments, rather, it is to understand it and try to discern what having one company controlling so much of the media we consume might mean going forward.

Before going any further, it is worth noting that the true power of Disney is not in what it owns but the sheer extent of its entrenchment in our minds. There are few facets of life, regardless of who owns them, that a person can’t find some reference or homage to Disney in one form or another. Looking for a horror story on the internet? There’s ‘Abandoned by Disney’. Are you interested in seeing a terrible attempt at a psychological thriller set in a theme park? Watch 'Escape from Tomorrow.' Hungry? There are mouse shaped chicken nuggets that Disney, at least directly, does not own.

Beyond that, they have managed to completely define the way in which we see fairy tales. Even reading the Brothers Grimm versions of many stories, it is still common for most people to picture the princesses and other characters the way that they were drawn by Disney. And this is all to say nothing of the theme parks!

But despite the firm place in the minds of all the company has attained through decades of massive movie releases and marketing both products and experiences to kids, Disney is best known today for its ravenous consumption of properties that don’t even necessarily fit into its brand. Marvel, Star Wars, Fox, the list goes on and on.

In fact, the most difficult part of writing the list in the previous paragraph was finding products that Disney had little to no part in, hence why one of them was an amateur short horror story and another was an awful independent film. It can be assumed at this point that if you have to think about the owner of a popular network of property for more than ten seconds, the answer is most likely that Disney owns it or is in the process of acquiring it.

But why do this? Why buy up properties that don’t actually fit into what your company is known for? The same reason a person would buy up Park Place and Boardwalk along with the railroads in Monopoly. It gives them a presence across the entire industry as well as making it so anyone and anything they do not own is forced to go along with what they want.

There is also the fact that it makes them even more money which can be used to buy even more influence.

There is an inherent problem with this, however, the same problem that caused actual monopolies to be banned in the 1930s.

Without competition, there is no longer an incentive to produce quality products or market them at reasonable prices. The second of these two, luckily, is not something we as consumers have to contend with from the mouse at the moment.

But the effect of Disney effectively having swallowed entertainment like the whale from Pinocchio has indeed had an effect on quality. While the most recent Star Wars movie worked fine as a movie, it was difficult not to feel like we, the audience, were watching a beloved series age out. There will be another Star Wars movie next year and another after that until people stop paying to see them.

This is just one example, and one could say it is symptomatic of a larger problem in Hollywood, but the point of the article is to point out that Disney effectively owns Hollywood, so it is more than fair to lay the blame at their feet.