Thanks to DoG regular Ron Hogan for bringing this up on this sleepy bank holiday Monday in blightey - turns out that Marvel Entertainment is firmly in the sights of Walt Disney, which has announced that it intends to buy the growing entertainment giant for an amazing four billion dollars.

The grim old X-Men will be keeping company with Mickey Mouse and friends under the deal proposed - truly a staggering investment, and something that is going to shake up the entertainment industry and set forums ablaze for weeks.

Disney, reports Reuters, has always been looking for new commercial in-roads to the young male consumer market. The company has a history of producing interesting experiments such as The Black Hole (1979) and TRON (1982), without ever really getting a feel for their target audience.

Now it seems that The Mouse has decided to take a costly shortcut and just buy up the company most-beloved of adolescent males worldwide (outside of the Hefner empire).

It's a pretty safe bet that whatever Marvel are doing right (quite a lot), Disney are going to want it to keep doing just that.

"(Marvel's) audience is surprisingly broad." says Disney Chief Financial Officer Tom Staggs. "It transcends gender and age and has real potential worldwide. They skew a little more toward boys than many of our properties...We at Disney had admired them because of their position and asset base. With conversations over time, we came to believe in the value of a combination."

Reuters