Comcast Buys Dreamworks Animation For $3.8 Billion

Do you like Shrek or How to Train Your Dragon? Congratulations: you’re now supporting Comcast, one of the nation’s most disliked companies.

The telecommunications giant announced today that it had purchased DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s studio will now fall under the purview of NBCUniversal, which is Comcast’s entertainment division, and Katzenberg will stay on as Chairman of DreamWorks New Media. “Having spent the past two decades working together with our team to build DreamWorks Animation into one of the world’s most beloved brands, I am proud to say that NBCUniversal is the perfect home for our company; a home that will embrace the legacy of our storytelling and grow our businesses to their fullest potential,” he said in a statement.

With the addition of the DreamWorks stable to its own Illumination Studios, which is responsible for the Despicable Me movies (and the inexplicable Minions craze), NBCUniversal seems to be inching closer to the Disney juggernaut in the family entertainment space. As for direct effects on consumers, this deal doesn’t seem like it will change much regarding the content set to come from DreamWorks Animation—Kung Fu Panda 3 is still going to be a stale sequel, and the How to Train Your Dragon franchise should still very much be the studio’s breadwinner—but it’s definitely important to know from whence your entertainment comes.

(We’d bring up Comcast’s status as the “worst company in America,” but they’re also our ISP.)