Yeah. It's standard in Labor Contracts to have various articles (Grievance, Work Rules, Hours of Work, Corrective Action, various Leaves, etc.) separated so they don't impact one another in case something goes wrong. I don't know how these negotiations work, but they could certainly, more or less, follow that model.
Does anyone know if there's a general format that is followed? It seems to me that there's a real advantage to separating things where possible in case you hit some snafu and everything goes fubar.
This is a fairly unique sale since it's not the whole company but certain select, pieces. With that in mind, I would suspect they might have broken up the assets into groups and approximate prices on those groups, something like:
Group A $500 Million
Group B $4.5 Billion
Group C $10 Billiion
Group D $15 Billion
Group E $7.5 Billion
Group F $500 Million
Group G $2 Billion
Then Disney could offer $40 billion (in stocks, cash, whatever) for the complete package and then if the Justice Department says: "Wait a minute, Group B and Group F give Disney a near monopoly of X. That's going to be a problem."
Then Disney could say: "Okay, in the interest of appeasing the Justice Department, we'll give you $35 billion for everything else and you can keep B and F or try to sell them to someone else."
And then if I were Disney, I might take it a step further. If we imagine Group A is the FF/X-Men rights, I'd say: "Look, before we get into this big, complicated deal, you know we have a special interest in Group A. We're going to write you a check for $500 million right now for Group A and take it off the table, then we'll reduce the value of the total deal to $39.5 Billion. The Justice Department can't have any problems with us ending that licensing agreement, because we're not even buying anything. We're just paying you to end it now rather than later. And that will also simplify things if there are any other problems because those licenses with their restrictions aren't going to be worth more to anybody else than they are to us."
I kind of doubt they went through that many hoops and they'll probably just work out details if/when the Justice Department objects, but I would have done something like that.
And if they did, Disney might already have the rights.
