George Lucas Consolidates his Empire

Shadowcat writes "George Lucas is consolidating his galaxy, merging LucasArts, Lucas Digital (ILM & Skywalker Sound), Lucas Licensing, and Lucasfilm into one mega-corporation to provide a single place to create all sorts of media. You can find the article on SF Chronicle Site."

Comments

More efficient this way...

[kakos]

I doubt this will change the fact that the third Star Wars will probably suck.

I always wondered why Lucas didn't do this before. He had all these disparate companies that did different things. It seems like he could do things a lot more efficiently if they combined everything into one mega-studio.

Re:More efficient this way...

[The Only Druid]

There's also a parallel to be drawn to Sony (as discussed by the recent WiReD article, and as linked to here on /.) that keeping cooporating companies seperated (like the Lucas* units were) in order to prevent mutually exclusive or mutually confusing goals.

Consider the artists at LucasArts who worked independently from LucasFilm and SkywalkerSound. While they may often have reason to work together, some people might find it easier (if they're from, say, Dreamworks) to work with ILM if its not attached directly to LucasFilm.

Re:Just maybe

[reaper20]

And in typical LucasArts fashion, only two of them would be good. Only Star Trek has had worse games. XWing and Tie Fighter (honorable mention to JK2) are the only good star wars games ....

*stares at his Star Wars - Masters of Teras Kasi*

Shit, I'd settle for remakes of the older games ....

Re:The Stock Market Shuffle

[KKin8or]

Is it me or do companies split off and merge at stock market whims? A companies stock goes up for merging, the all merge. When one company makes money from spinning off, they all start spinning off companies.

That may be true, but in this case, not so much so. According to the article, Lucasfilm is privately held, so doesn't have a stock price tracked on the market and millions of stockholders to make happy. They're not doing this to raise stock prices, because its stock isn't publicly traded. They're doing it so that all the companies can share resources without stepping on each others' toes as much. So if the games people want a bit of CG footage from a movie, they won't have to go through as much red tape, because it's already owned by their company. Or if they want to bring in the lead designer for a movie's special effects to talk to game artists, it'll be much easier. This might translate into more profits, but has nothing to do with stock price.

George Lucas Inc....

[Suchetha]

... You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.. we must be cautious"

But hell, no matter what i gotta give him props what must be one of the greatest space fantasies i have seen (episodes iv - vi anyway)

Suchetha

I doubt this will help Lucas

[DavidinAla]

To be honest, if I were a competitor of one of Lucas' companies, I would be happy to see this consolidation, assuming that they're truly going to put one management team in charge of the whole thing. Here's why.

1) As independent operations, each of those companies has a clear focus. The management team at the sound company knows that its goal is to provide the best sound work possible in order to get business from other production companies making films. The video game unit is focusing on making money on its games. The ILM people are focused on effects and selling those effects to other studios. From a business point of view, combining will tend to make those units lose focus, because they're now going to be looking at what the new "big boss" wants instead of focusing on individual goals. See Al Ries' book, "Focus," for a good discussion of why focus is essential to a company. (Actually, see almost any of the work from Ries and Jack Trout for more support of this point, going back to their work in the '70s on positioning.)

2) This is going to potentially create sales problems for the divisions that sell to other movie studios. As it has been, a studio that bought its special effects from ILM was dealing with a specialist company, NOT a competing studio. ILM's specialist competitors are now going to be saying (to other studios), "Why would you want to use LucasFilm? They're your competitor." You might say that it was that way already, but there's a very real difference when you're dealing with a company with a different name and different management team. If a studio is angry at LucasFilm for some action that it's taken in one area, they'll hold it against the whole company since they'll be one combined operation.

I know this is being pitched as something to streamline operations and reasons like that, but I would bet that the original idea originated with the bean counters for reasons involving taxes or other accounting reasons. My bet is that the decision was made for accounting reasons and is being sold as something to help operations.

I honestly don't see any operational advantage and I see multiple disadvantages. It will be interesting to see how the combined company does in the future (as compared to how its doing in its current structure), but since the numbers are private, we might never know.

David