The Scene staff
George Lucas, creator of the blockbuster movie saga “Star Wars,” has been sitting pretty on a $4 billion mountain of money ever since Disney bought Lucasfilms back in 2012. What fans have been dying to know is what the legendary filmmaker thinks about the new era of his once-cherished franchise.
No matter how much you may have enjoyed the latest series installments, it’s impossible to ignore that they have been less-than-embraced by fans and the box office alike. The last “Star Wars” movie, “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” lost Disney an estimated $50 million during its 2018 theater run, while its predecessors — “The Force Awakens” (2015), “Rogue One” (2016) and “The Last Jedi” (2017) — raked in billions.
The explanation many give for this incredible drop in attendance is Episode 8, “The Last Jedi.” Love it or hate it, the movie destroyed the fan base and split man against fellow man in a conflict that is still being fought.
The internet is a place where anybody can speak his mind about anything, and after “The Last Jedi” was released, that fact was never more true. Social-media sites like YouTube, Reddit and Twitter became battlegrounds for a war of opinions over a single polarizing movie.
The shockwaves of this fanbase split culminated in the box-office bomb that was “Solo.” Since then, things have only gotten worse.
Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” argues with fans on Twitter almost daily, desperately trying to defend his movie. Out of 23.3 thousand tweets from followers, many are devoted solely to insulting fans that give fair and constructive criticism to the movie, calling them “man babies,” just for caring about a franchise that has been a part of their lives for more than 30 years.
Amid all of this madness, Lucas has been eerily silent. That is, since he called Disney “white slavers” in 2015. Yes, he actually said that.
If that didn’t show Lucas’ thoughts on his deal with Disney, I don’t know what would. However, on Sept. 24, we were blessed with even more insight into the biggest acquisition in movie history.
It came from Bob Iger himself in his memoir, “The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.” He definitely shines a spotlight on how the acquisition was received by Lucas.
But that’s not all. In a bona fide bombshell reveal, Iger admits to purchasing outlines to the sequel trilogy (Episodes 7-9), written by Lucas.
“At some point in the process, George told me that he had completed outlines for three new movies,” Iger wrote. “He agreed to send us three copies of the outlines: one for me; one for (Disney senior executive vice president, general counsel and secretary) Alan Braverman; and one for (co-chairman and chief creative officer) Alan Horn, who’d just been hired to run our studio.
“Alan Horn and I read George’s outlines and decided we needed to buy them, though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines he’d laid out.”
The pubic had heard rumors of Lucas writing outlines for the movies, but never had we known that Disney not only bought them, it threw them away.
“(Lucas) knew that I was going to stand firm on the question of creative control, but it wasn’t an easy thing for him to accept,” Iger wrote in the book. “And so he reluctantly agreed to be available to consult with us at our request. I promised that we would be open to his ideas (this was not a hard promise to make; of course we would be open to George Lucas’ ideas), but like the outlines, we would be under no obligation.”
More and more, it seems Lucas wasn’t big on selling his “Star Wars” movies, which he frequently calls his “babies.” And if he was so reluctant, then why did he do it in the first place? Did he simply succumb to the allure of that ungodly amount of money? Or did he really believe in Disney and its creative team and trust them to honor the characters and storylines?
There are even more inflammatory and incriminating sections in Iger’s book:
“George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations,” he wrote. “… The truth was, (“The Force Awakens” writer director) Kathy, J.J. (Abrams), Alan, and I had discussed the direction in which the saga should go, and we all agreed that it wasn’t what George had outlined.
“George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better.
“I should have prepared him for the meeting with J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction. I could have talked through this with him and possibly avoided angering him by not surprising him. … Now, in the first meeting with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”
There we have it from the man himself. You can’t get a more reliable source.
Now that we have this information, we must ask, “Who allowed Iger to put this information in his book?” It seems that he shot himself in the foot, and for seemingly no reason or gain.
Had Lucas known that Disney wouldn’t use his ideas for the sequel trilogy, perhaps he wouldn’t have sold the rights in the first place.
Iger may have made a foolish mistake by revealing behind-the-scenes negotiations on “Star Wars,” but I applaud him for being honest, no matter how shocking and disturbing are his revelations.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that room when Lucas discovered his saga wasn’t going to end the way he planned.
It’s known that Lucas’ sequel trilogy would have explored the weirder side of “Star Wars,” diving into the “microscopic realm” of a lesser-known canon. This doesn’t sound like the best way to go, but many people and especially fans would welcome anything that came from the mind of Lucas himself.
Unfortunately, the world will never know what could’ve been.
The “Skywalker Saga” (Episodes 1-9) is coming to an end in December with the release of “The Rise of Skywalker.” A new age of “Star Wars” movies is dawning, straying farther and farther from Lucas’ original vision. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m sure the box office numbers will decide.