Marvel, Disney, and the Tears of Ahmet Zappa.

• Photoshoppery by Monet Molina.

So I woke up this morning thinking that the best idea anyone would have all day would be mine—that of a TV show called 2.5 Males. But it turns out some fancy business-types had me beat in the awesome idea department: As Steve mentioned this a.m., Marvel’s been bought by Disney for four billion dollars, a figure slightly less than I expect my 2.5 Males spec script to fetch.

“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four, and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Walt Disney Company. “Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney.”

“We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation,” Iger said.

I don’t even know what a “value creation” or an “Ike Perlmutter” is (though I do know a thing or two about “long-term growth,” ladies), but I know what this whole Disney/Marvel thing means: LOTS OF MONEY. Well, for Disney, at least. Maybe not so much for Boom! Studios. Or Universal Studios. Or Ahmet Zappa. But otherwise? Yes! LOTS OF MONEY.

‘Cause here’s the thing: While nobody knows where the direct market for hard copies of comic books will be in a few years (I suspect the success or failure of Longbox is going to play a pretty big role in that), I think Marvel makes most of, or at least a huge chunk of, their cash not from comics but from merchandising—a tactic Disney’s pretty familiar with. Likewise, Marvel’s ability to get a ton of their properties on the big screen—not only through established movie studios, but also by becoming a movie studio themselves—dovetails nicely with Disney’s methods of exploiting their franchises. If Disney can let Marvel do its own thing, as they’ve done with Pixar (and Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada seems to think they will), then this could be an incredibly lucrative arrangement that wouldn’t stifle Marvel’s creativity. And I challenge any geek on the planet not to get excited by this tidbit, via Comic Book Resources:

When asked if there was potential for cross-polination between Marvel and Pixar, Disney said that Pixar’s John Lasseter has met with key Marvel creative executives recently and the group got “pretty excited, very fast.”

Regardless of how it all ends up working out, in terms of comics and film—and toys, and theme parks, and t-shirts, and videogames, and god knows what else—I’ll wager that we’ll be seeing the repercussions of this for years to come.

More info: The Beat, The Hollywood Reporter, and The New York Times, and Bleeding Cool, which has collected some great Twitter reactions to the news, from Marvel editor Steve Wacker’s “Deadpool is now called Alivepool” to Kevin Smith’s “’nuff spent! Marvel, like their Distinguised Competition, is now owned by a corporate juggernaut.”