Lynxara
Nice post!!
If Disney were "mismanaging" anythng, they'd never have been able to buy the anti-christ of comic book companies would they?
Sure they could. Marvel is up to its neck in debt due to the cost of opening its movie studio and the comics publishing barely turns a profit. Time-Warner bought out DC when it was much bigger and more successful. For Disney, buying Marvel was just a matter of feeling like they could use the company's IP.
While Disney makes money hand over fist from some of its divisions, the company is infamous for not being able to consistently market much of anything to young boys. Most of its successful in IP in this area have been generated by Pixar, not by any of the internal Disney teams.
There's a long history of failure you can read about here if you like, but most of the recent ones involved trying to turn its Pirates of the Caribbean franchise into a consistently profitable line of boys' merchandise. The movies succeeded, but the tie-in goods sure didn't.