Also, the other parties interested in buying Fox are Verizon and Comcast. For as scary as it might be, Disney still seems like the best option.
Interesting. I was in the middle of making a completely different post in response, but looked up the revenue of each company in billions of US dollars per year:
Fox 32
Disney 55
Verizon 126
Comcast 80
Disney would only buy the entertainment portion, leaving news and sports fox alone.
That said, of the three companies, Disney would put the most on the line. But of the three Verizon is the only one without an established, successful media brand. Comcast has all the NBC properties, telemundo, universal pictures and all the universal parks, USA network, and several other media brands.
Disney and Comcast operate fundamentally differently, though. Disney folds IP into its system, over time eliminating the overhead of multiple teams and having essentially one utterly huge machine producing all these different IPs. Comcast appears to leave all their IP operations separate and operates them largely as subsidiaries.
As such I don't think that the Fox IP would be worse under comcast, but it also wouldn't be much better. Perhaps they'd have more resources to develop IP Fox has rights to but can't due to funding issues. They'd certainly have more funding than Disney - but conversely they might not want to put any of that on the line anyway.
Disney would be much more efficient at producing extra Fox IP. You'd see more of it across its properties - disney channel, movies, toys, video games, etc, so more IP might get greenlit under Disney, even though it's a smaller total organization. It probably wouldn't enable more movies per year than we get now, but the fox movies would become Disney movies and we'd see more character crossover in properties where it makes sense.
Verizon would probably just let Fox be Fox, and if they exert any significant control they'd use it to become their media platform going forward, rebrand everything Verizon, and most changes would take years to complete before it really felt like a verizon property. But they have the financial muscle to force Fox into a position where, under the right guidance, it could take on and overshadow the entertainment industry if they chose to flex it.
Certainly is an interesting proposition in any case.