What Does The Future Hold For Valiant’s Post-DMG Entertainment Buy Up?

[**Note: The following are simply predictions and examples from history. Thus they don’t represent any real plans by DMG Entertainment or its affiliates.]

As Erik Amaya has already posted on this very site about DMG Entertainment’s buyout of Valiant Entertainment, I won’t go into the hows of this news. Instead I will simply say that this is similar to both the 2009 purchase of Marvel by Disney and a regular shareholder buyout. However, this is unlike a regular in-company buyout since there is more uncertainty than just about things like job security. Like the Marvel purchase we have the as-of-yet unjustified fear of changes in tone and characterization.
Now, the first of these two primary fears, a fear in change of tone, is not likely to come true unless DMG Entertainment decides to water down, or crank up, things like the violence. Yet this is the most unlikely thing to happen for the foreseeable time ahead. What is more likely is that characters could become more harmonized to the actors will portray them in other media projects that we know about. Case in point is the upcoming Ninjak vs. The Valiant Universe co-production with Bat In The Sun, which could cause some design changes. For example, artists could be tasked to draw Bloodshot to look more like Jason David Frank. Of course, these kind of changes depend on things like success, failure, and corporate directives.

That said, DMG’s staff could be smarter than Disney (Marvel) or AOL Time-Warner (DC) by doing the following: Allowing characters to continue to age and time to pass relatively normally. In other words, keeping the creative directive the same. Keeping dead characters dead and continuing to create new intellectual properties (I.E. Bloodsquirt). The last, smarter thing they could do is to actually keep fan engagement the same by having staff continue to communicate with pros and non-pros at conventions.
Finally, I think we could now get more output from Valiant’s publishing side. However, I think this would be a bad move due to the fact that the more titles a comics company publishes, the more problems might arise. This is mainly due to how difficult communication can be between different editors and creative teams already working on storylines. Thus retcons might become the focus, instead of creating new stories which might require even more organization and communication. Also, it would become harder for fans to purchase those titles along with those from other companies (most likely the Big Two) due to limited personal budgets. Therefore, Valiant could conceivably lose customers and become too big a risk for DMG to continue with.
In conclusion, DMG could bring Valiant to new heights or increase the risk of failure like Acclaim did in the past. It is really just a wait and see situation at this point.