The Muppets Studio, LLC was a wholly owned subsidiary of media conglomerate The Walt Disney Company, formed in 2004 through the acquisition of The Muppets and Bear in the Big Blue House assets from The Jim Henson Company.

Since the mid-1980s, Jim Henson had been in talks with Disney CEO Michael Eisner to sell Disney the Muppets. He and other Muppet performers had secretly filmed tutorials for Disney animators, entertainers and Imagineers on the matter of how to properly operate a Muppet, and many Muppet producers were already preparing for the transfer.

On August 28, 1989, the two announced a deal for Disney to buy Henson Associates and all of its characters, minus the characters from Sesame Street (although Eisner initially wanted them). The deal fell through several months after Jim Henson's death in 1990, largely due to clashes between the Henson family and Disney attorneys.

The real-life occurrence of this history was later parodied in the 1990 TV special, The Muppets at Walt Disney World.

The Muppets are a group of puppet characters created by Jim Henson starting in 1954–55. Although the term is often used to refer to any puppet that resembles the distinctive style of The Muppet Show, the term is both an informal name and legal trademark owned by the Walt Disney Company in reference to the original characters created by Henson.

Henson has said the word "Muppet" predated the show Sam and Friends. He would sometimes tell people the term had been created by combining the words "marionette" and "puppet", but he also said that it was really just a made-up word.

After earlier unsuccessful attempts, the Walt Disney Company bought the Muppets in 2004. Exceptions include characters appearing on Sesame Street (as they were previously sold to Sesame Workshop, although they have always had creative rights, only reimbursing the Jim Henson Company to create and provide their Muppet characters for their use) and the Fraggles of Fraggle Rock (which are still owned by the Jim Henson Company). The legal trademark on the term "Muppet" is currently held by The Muppets Studio, a wholly owned division of the Walt Disney Company, although Sesame Workshop and the Jim Henson Company continue to occasionally use the term on their characters with certain permissions from Disney.