When Disney Bought Lucasfilm The World Forever Changed
Image Source: WDWNT
In hindsight, very few moments in a person's life qualify for the "where were you when you heard" badge. For Star Wars fans, October 30, 2012, was such a moment. I remember being on my commute to work on a downtown train to Vienna (yes, the one that Billy Joel sings about), going through my usual Apple news and rumor sites on my iPhone 4, before opening up TheForce.net, which at that time was still to the go-to place for everything Star Wars. Reading the number 1 headline fundamentally changed my day, as well as probably those of countless other fans around the world:
"Disney Buying Lucasfilm, Plans New Star Wars Film"
The rather lengthy press release went deep into the history of Lucasfilm and Star Wars and the impact the movies had made since 1977. But the important parts were that Disney would acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. for $4.05 billion from George Lucas. Kathleen Kennedy would become the new CEO of Lucasfilm, and Star Wars Episode 7 (not VII!) would be released in 2015.
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It would be wrong to say that Star Wars was in a "Dark Time" back then, as it had been in the late 80s. There were regular releases of books and comics. The bright star of the franchise was The Clone Wars animated series, which was at its peak then. But as the events of the series came closer and closer to Episode III, it would be only a matter of time before the series had to come to its natural end.
There were talks and rumors about a mysterious second animated show called Detours, helmed by Seth Green and Mathew Senreich. The video game 1313 had been in development for years and had gone through several principal changes. And, of course, a live-action Star Wars series (Underground) that Geoge Lucas had been talking about for years, with dozens of finished scripts sitting on the shelves and waiting for technology to catch up to make production finally feasible.
After the backlash he had to face following the prequel trilogy, Lucas, being 68, wasn't too keen on spending another decade of his life creating another trilogy, which basically meant no more new Star Wars movies.
And now, suddenly, this revelation!
Looking back, there were signs on the wall. When Kennedy, one of the most profound producers in Hollywood, was announced to become co-chairman of Lucasfilm, it was obvious that she had not accepted Lucas' offer just to oversee the production of some animated shows, but rather some new feature films under the Lucasfilm banner.
Image Source: Star Wars News Net
Needless to say that I didn't get much work done that Tuesday, October 30. Sitting in my office I read most of the articles from all the major news sites that reported on that matter. Then I went on to Pablo Hidalgo's piece on Starwars.com, about how he had found out about the plans for new movies (he explicitly talked about Episodes 7, 8, and 9, not just about 7, as the press release had). And then came Jonathan W. Rinzler’s article about how the number of episodes, that would make up the Star Wars saga has changed over the decades.
I greeted most of my colleagues not by saying "Hi" or "Hello there," but just with "They are making 7, 8, and 9." Knowing me and my passion for Star Wars (and probably having heard the news themselves), I didn't need to explain what I meant. As a teenager in the mid-80s, I always assumed that Lucas would carry on putting out new Star Wars films every three years, continuing the adventures of Luke, Han, and Leia after the end of Return of the Jedi. And now, more than 30 years later, my dream would finally come true (or so I thought back then).
Disney's check of $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm and all its intellectual property is a hefty sum, even for someone with a wallet as big as that of George Lucas. But Disney had paid $7.4 billion for Pixar (which started as part of Lucasfilm’s computer division) in 2006, just nine years after it had released its first feature film, Toy Story. Samuel L. Jackson stated publicly that Lucas had probably been hornswoggled with this deal. But the major difference was that Pixar was putting out movies regularly, while the last new Star Wars film had been released seven years ago (not counting The Clone Wars feature from 2008), and the company had no concrete plans for continuing the saga on the big screen.
To sweeten the deal (and probably to earn Lucas the extra 50 million), The Maker had created outlines for the new trilogy and handed them over to Disney as a kind of legacy. These outlines should act as the foundation for the respective scripts to be written by renowned authors and to be put on film by top-class directors.
Rewatching the five-part video series that Star Wars released on YouTube on October 30 and the following days is kind of bittersweet.
Lynne Hale talked to Lucas and Kennedy about the past and future of Lucasfilm and Star Wars. Kennedy spoke of how Lucas was her little Yoda, with whom she would consult when creating new Star Wars content, and Lucas stated that Disney was the natural choice as a new home for his company. He further expressed his hopes that the company would carry on what he had started.
In the weeks and month after October 30, the initial enthusiasm about the acquisition and the prospect of new Star Wars movies started to turn sour. As Bob Iger, Disney's then-CEO, has stated in his autobiography The Ride of A Lifetime, there never was the intention to use Lucas' ideas for the new films, or to hire him as a consultant going forward. When he sold his company, he basically lost his right to have any say on the future of Star Wars, which finally led to Lucas' frustrated outburst of Disney being "white slavers." Disney quickly axed The Clone Wars (and Detours), stopped work on 1313, and put Underworld on an indefinite hiatus. A few months later, they moved the complete Expanded Universe of hundreds of books and thousands of comics into Legends, basically declaring them non-canon.
Image Source: The Disney Blog
But it would be unfair to say that Lucasfilm under Disney's umbrella has screwed up Star Wars. The sequel trilogy didn't turn out to be what many (long-time) fans, including myself, had hoped. Lucasfilm struggled, and still does, to bring Star Wars projects to the big screen. But at the same time, it has invested massively both in creating high-quality shows for Disney+ and expanding the Star Wars presence in its theme parks (Galaxy's Edge). A Star Wars franchise under Lucas's leadership would likely have much less content than it has today, so it is hard to complain. In hindsight, it probably would have been a good idea to stick to the original idea of keeping The Maker involved as a creative consultant. After all, it is still the galaxy he created.
But all this was still in the always-moving future, back on this Tuesday, October 30, 2012, when the galaxy far, far away changed forever.
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Source(s): TheForce.net, Starwars.com, YouTube
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