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Friday March 29, 2024

Disney to buy Fox film, TV businesses for $52b

By REUTERS
December 15, 2017

WASHINGTON: Walt Disney Co has struck a deal to buy film, television and international businesses from Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox Inc for $52.4 billion in stock as the world’s largest entertainment company seeks even greater scale to combat growing digital rivals Netflix Inc and Amazon.com Inc. The deal brings to a close more than half a century of expansion by Murdoch, 86, who turned a single Australian newspaper he inherited from his father at the age of 21 into one of the world’s most important global news and film conglomerates. Shares of Fox, which have surged 35 percent since talk of the deal surfaced in early November, were slightly lower in premarket trading.