TO INFINITY AND BEYOND?
Disney Co. To Star Wars‘s Luke Skywalker: ‘I Am Your Father’
By Elizabeth C.
LUKE SKYWALKER HAS A NEW DADDY THANKS TO Walt Disney Co.’s $4.05 billion purchase of George Lucas’ Lucasfilms and its sister production companies, Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound.
Disney announced the purchase Tuesday at the same time revealing plans for a seventh, eighth and ninth films in the Star Wars franchise, Fox Entertainment reports.
In a statement released on YouTube, Lucas said, “I’m doing this so that the films will have a longer life.”
He also said the partnership with Disney “is just such a perfect fit. I felt that I really wanted to put the company somewhere in a larger entity which would protect it. Disney is a huge corporation. They’ve have all kinds of capabilities and facilities so there’s a lot of strength gained from this.”
The deal propels Lucas — already No. 36 on the Forbes’ Richest Celebrity list and No. 120 on the Forbes 400 — further into wealth’s stratosphere. The Star Wars brand has generated $27 billion dollars in income off seven films, games, toys, books, and other products, according to StatisticBrain.
“For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” Lucas, chairman and CEO of Lucasfilm Ltd., said in a statement. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”
Die-hard fans of the original Star Wars movies have been merciless toward Lucas who they accused of being a “commercial sell-out” and “desecrating the heroic tale that he originally sought to tell.”
According to Fox, the relentless criticism wore away at Lucas, who told the New York Times an in interview early this year: “Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”
Now in the announcement made on the YouTube video posted below, Lucas says, “I always said I wasn’t going to do any more and that’s true, because I’m not going to do any more, but that doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to turn it over [to Disney].”
The deal means Lucasfilms joins the Disney fold which also includes the major brands Pixar, Marvel, ESPN and ABC.
