Lucasfilm To Be Purchased By Disney For $4 Billion
It was announced yesterday that Disney has agreed to purchase Lucasfilm for $4 billion in a stock-and-cash deal. The assets that Disney will be getting from this acquisition include Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound studios, but most importantly the Star Wars franchise, both film and merchandising. You can bet that Disney has plans to milk that Star Wars gravy-train for all it’s worth.
That’s because starting in 2015 Disney will be releasing Episode 7, the first film in a new trilogy of live-action Star Wars movies. Now, before anybody gets too despondent over this news, know that it appears that Lucas isn’t going to be the director. Instead, he will be working as a “creative consultant” on Episode 7, and in fact has even stated that “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.” While many people think he was the director for all 6 movies, that’s not actually true as Lucas only directed the original Star Wars and the prequels. In Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner was the director, while Richard Marquand directed Return of the Jedi.
So what does that mean for future Star Wars games? Since LucasArts is under the whole Lucasfilm umbrella, it is also now a Disney company, meaning there shouldn’t be any issues with having LucasArts create any more Star Wars games. At this time there have been no cancellations, and that all projects are still on for the time being. However, it appears that AAA console titles may end up getting the shaft. According to Disney CEO Robert Iger, he said that “We’re likely to focus more on social and mobile than we are on console. We’ll look opportunistically at console, most likely in licensing rather than publishing, but we think that given the nature of these characters and how well known they are, and the storytelling, that they lend themselves quite nicely, as they’ve already demonstrated to the other platforms.” In other words, if LucasArts is making anything it’s going to be piddly social and mobile games, and Disney is going to license out the big games to other developers. That’s not a good sign for Star Wars 1313, which was announced earlier this year.
