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Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm, Star Wars Episode 7 Due In 2015

Posted by Soulskill on from the wait-what dept.

Jason Levine writes "Disney will acquire Lucasfilm, including the Star Wars trilogy. Additionally, Star Wars: Episode 7 is due to be released in 2015, with more feature films on the way. George Lucas said, 'For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next. 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. I'm confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come.'"

9 of 816 comments (clear)

  1. Joss Whedon's Star Wars by Sez+Zero · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Disney/Marvel have Joss Whedon under contract through 2015. Just sayin'.

  2. Pixar + ILM by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Two shops full of the best brains working under the same virtual roof. Might be interesting. Especially if we get writing/direction from someone other than George. Love ya, George, but hopefully the only wooden acting we'll see from now on will by Woody The Cowboy.

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  3. Irony by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in 1979 Disney produced a film called "The Black Hole". As a 10 year old I actually really liked the movie when I saw it back in the early 80s (on the newly-created Disney Channel of course), but it was considered one of Disney's biggest movie flops. It was pretty much a blatant rip-off of Star Wars, and was certainly an attempt to try and cash in on the huge popularity of Star Wars. The film had all the basic pieces - spaceships, laser guns, "ESP" kind of extrasensory stuff going on (aka The Force), and of course Robots.

    So now, 33 years later, it looks like Disney finally got the real thing. The actual Star Wars franchise.

    On a different note, I can't help but wonder if Lucas is in poor health. He always hated Hollywood, and despised studios having any control over his creative process. So for him to sell his own film company, which he built from scratch, to a major studio goes against everything he's said and done for decades.

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  4. Possibility of original edition Blu-rays? by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So does this mean we might finally get high-definition releases of the original Star Wars films without all of Lucas's later alterations?

  5. THRAWN! by raaum · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now that he's selling it, who cares what his original "vision" was for episodes 7 and beyond? Grand Admiral Thrawn is the obvious direction to take.

  6. Re:I felt a great disturbance in the Force by Fallingcow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are you kidding? Great news!

    Now there's a small chance that we'll at least get transfers of the film reels from the early '90s THX-enhanced theater releases to BluRay, if not an even better cleaned-up version of the originals.

    Thank God George "we destroyed all the pre-Special Edition copies in the course of making it" Lucas' lying ass is finally out of the way. Bring on the hi-def, unmolested (well, mostly unmolested, at least) original trilogy!

    Disney loves money. Doing this will make them truckloads of money and cost very little.

  7. Re:I'm Optimistic by jigamo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Disney has confirmed plans for a new trilogy (Episodes 7-9), and the movies are currently in "early stage development." They're looking to release a movie every other year, with 2015, 2017, and 2019 as the current target dates.

    I'm personally rooting for expanding into some of Timothy Zahn's books as they move beyond those. I wonder how they'll treat the Extended Universe?

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  8. How about a re-boot of Episodes I through III? by Slutticus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Screw the later ones. Redo!
    Episode I: Directed by J.J. Abrams
    Episode II: Directed by Christopher Nolan
    Episode III: Directed by Guillermo del Toro

  9. comics licensees lose out... again by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now watch Dark Horse Comics, which has had the Star Wars comics license for ages, producing some of the best "extended universe" material in the franchise, helping to maintain the fanbase during the dark time between RotJ and TPM... get screwed out of it, because Disney has its own comics publisher (Marvel). That's what happened with Boom Comics, which was developing a rather good line of comics featuring Disney-owned characters, but lost it when Disney bought Marvel. In both cases, good small independent publishers got screwed by The Mouse.

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