Disney buying Lucasfilm for $4 billion! More Star Wars movies coming!

[Someone]

I can't wait for the opening line.

"Star Wars episode VII is the most dissapointing thing since Star Wars Episode III"

Go Mr Plinkett!!

 

[Hal G]

If Disney can do to Lucas Films (Star Wars and Indiana Jones) what they did to Marvel, I say bravo. Lucas was the issue for a long time to the SW franchise. Maybe being less personally invested may make it better.

 

[Someone]

Actually, the possibilities are endless. A Pixar movie with droids. Even better, with toy droids!! A crossover with the Avengers: Iron Man Vs the Sith! Luke Skywalker meets captain Sparrow!

And Leia as a Disney princess!!

 

[Umbran]

This is great news! I'm so tired of Lucas complete mismanagement of the franchise. The prequels were an utter travesty.

You realize, of course, that lots and lots of younger viewers prefer the prequels? That they revitalized the business of the franchise, driving creation of the highly successful Clone Wars aniimated series, and untold millions in merchandise sales?

"Management of the franchise," is a business matter, and the answer is driven by the bottom line. "The prequels were a travesty" is a matter of personal esthetic sensibilities.

Considering their amazing track record with Pixar and Marvel, this can only be an improvement.

Pixar and Marvel are feathers in their cap now, yes, showing signs that Disney has learned a few things. I do hope it carries over.

 

[Desdichado]

Oh thank the unspeakable gods of the Outer Hells! There was no chance Mr. Taking his ball & Going home would have EVER let the Expanded Universe make it to the big screen!

Only way I could be happier about this is if Disney announced they were getting H.R. Giger for costume design on the Yuuzhan Vong... that probably isn't happening, and would be a long ways off even if it did.

Hopefully the folks in charge still have enough sense to follow "Mr Taking his ball & Going home" in that regard. There has been precious little in the EU that has been anywhere near the quality of the original trilogies. And it's not like they were incredibly cinema.

 

[Desdichado]

I also think people are missing that the series was mostly aimed at young'uns, not adults.

I think that position has been repeatedly overstated over the years. The first Star Wars movie featured some language that was pretty harsh in a show supposedly for kids in 1977. Plus, it had a fair bit of brutal violence (Vader killing that officer in the first few minutes), bloody dismemberment (before Lucas cleaned up the blood in the DVD Edition)... sure, I was a 5 year old kid when it came out, and I loved it, but I really wonder how much it was aimed at kids vs. how much that's a story that's been told after the fact.

 

[Desdichado]

Am I in the minority in hoping the Zahn books are not the basis of the new trilogy? The anti-force lizards alone turned me off to them. I'd rather see a focus on the kids of the originals/Jedi Academy storyline. The age of the original actors is irrelevant then.

The Thrawn books were OK, not great. The Old Republic stuff by Bioware was pretty cool. Other than that, I have no interest in much of the EU, and in fact actively dislike it. I take a perverse joy everytime some little detail in the prequels or the Clone Wars TV show skewers some point of C-canon.

I absolutely hope that everything in the EU, including the Thrawn trilogy, is completely ignored by the folks working on the new movies, the same way George has done.

 

[Desdichado]

Any idea on how Disney handles licenses? How they treat RPGs?

It might be pretty hectic at FFG's right now.

They let them run out, if they can, but they don't really go around trying to actively break previously existing deals. It's got to be particularly galling to them that Universal Studios had a pre-existing and apparently evergreen deal to host Marvel Island in their theme parks right up the street from DisneyWorld.

Other than that; stuff like the Marvel cartoons on Cartoon Network finished their seasons and then weren't renewed (to pave the way for new Marvel content launching on DisneyXD.) Marvel still operates pretty independently. All the pre-existing Pixar projects were left alone, etc. I don't think that there's any notion that Disney would pull the plug on FFG. They may not renew the license after whatever period that it currently has, though. Which would be unfortunate if it only runs up until 2014 or 2015 or something like that.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

The prequels just needed more polish. They had a lot of interesting bits (Yoda vs Count Doku for instance, Jango Fett), and even the storyline wasn't bad, I just think he had forgotten how to make movies and perhaps hewed too close to the source materials, the old serials.

Well, mythbusters proved you could polish a turd, so perhaps...

There were moments, the biggest in my mind was Doku's attempt to lure Obi-Wan to his side by revealing that a Darth Sidious had taken control of the Republic. What a colossal twist that would have been if Doku was really some sort of Knight Templar / Ends Justify the Means type character who started a civil war to destroy the last Sith Lord. Sadly, no

I also think people are missing that the series was mostly aimed at young'uns, not adults.

You can make quality movies that appeal to kids and adults. Pixar does it about once a year. The best example of it was with The Incredibles (one of the best super-hero movies ever created). The kid in us all enjoy the cool super heroics. The adults enjoy the story of Mr. Incredible's mid-life crisis.

 

[Desdichado]

You realize, of course, that lots and lots of younger viewers prefer the prequels? That they revitalized the business of the franchise, driving creation of the highly successful Clone Wars aniimated series, and untold millions in merchandise sales?

Uh... maybe. I'd need to see a source for that before I believed it.

Anecdotally, my little boys (who are starting to get not quite so little at this point) really like the Clone Wars. They think the prequels are badly made but pretty movies. They think the original trilogy has much better stories and characters but look lame and old. They're certainly discriminating enough to desire something with more of the storytelling chops of the first movies, without such clunky dialogue, abysmal pacing and complete lack of chemistry or likeability to the characters, but the visual design and special effects of the newer movies.

I'm feeling optimistic enough to hope for the same--something that manages to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses of both the original and the prequel trilogies are, capitalize on the strengths and minimize the weaknesses.

"Management of the franchise," is a business matter, and the answer is driven by the bottom line. "The prequels were a travesty" is a matter of personal esthetic sensibilities.

The franchise didn't really exist as such after about the mid 1980s, until the Thrawn books made Lucas realize that there was still life left in it. Licensing it out to Dell Rey and then to various video game producers brought the franchise back to life to the point where Lucas could concieve of doing the movies again. How much the prequels contributed to the growing of the franchise vs. possibly blunting efforts that were going on already anyway remains to be seen. Certainly they made a fair bit of money in their own right, but not like the original trilogy (especially relative to their budgets.) No matter how you cut it, the prequels were not nearly as successful as the original, and the franchise had already come back to life before the prequels came out.

With any luck, the franchise will continue for decades and we'll get tons of movies, James Bond style, as well as continued video games, LEGO sets, novels and who knows whatever else merchandizing. And we'll look back at the era of the prequels as a bit of a low point, like the Roger Moore films, that only lasted temporarily.