Disney to acquire Lucasfilm, Star Wars franchise

[TitusTodd]

Really, it came down to letting Star Wars die with Lucas or for Lucas to become eternal by extending the life of Star Wars. Lucas had already thrown his hands up in the air with all the flack he has gotten with what he has done to his creation. Upon further reflection, I'm sure he decided he couldn't let it go but didn't have the desire to take more flack by going at it himself. Disney has shown it doesn't kill everything with the success Marvel continues to have. Pixar is still doing good and any "demise" is self inflicted not Disney inflicted, IMO. So, Disney had the means and Lucas had the desire.

I'm looking forward to more Star Wars and there is lots of good content to draw from. As long as there is appetite for it, produce it.

I wonder about further feature film animation efforts from Lucasfilm (ILM). Will they continue?

[Dan]

After roughly a day of speculation and reports, Lucasfilm has confirmed through the official Star Wars web site that Michael Arndt will be writing the screenplay for Episode VII.

Vulture was the first to break the story of Arndt's possible involvement yesterday, noting that he had written a 40-page story treatment that was beginning to make the rounds from director to director.

Arndt is best known to animation fans for writing the screenplay to Toy Story 3, for which he garnered an Academy Award nomination for Adapted Screenplay. He previously won the Original Screenplay award for Little Miss Sunshine, the first movie he ever wrote. Arndt is also currently writing the screenplays for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the Tom Cruise feature Oblivion directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron Legacy, the upcoming live-action Phineas and Ferb film, and the as-of-yet untitled Pixar film directed by Pete Docter.

Arndt is a known Star Wars fan, having spent one of his writing lectures in 2009 on the last act of the first film.

[Randall]

This can only be good news. All of the buzz over the films so far seems positive to me, with rumoured involvement of the original leads, and some top directors suggested. I think they'll do this right.

[GeorgeC]

Rand --

Need I remind you about how well sequels go with cast members TWENTY OR MORE YEARS after they did their last film together??? Not to mention all the remakes???

There is whole graveyard of these films that died on arrival or got roundly criticized with justification after they made their money --
Blues Brothers 2000
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls
Halloween remake
Nightmare on Elm Street remake
Get Smart theatrical feature (technically the second; the first feature, "The Nude Bomb," also another execrable film, starred the original Maxwell Smart, Don Adams)

and many films five years or less between sequels --
Ghostbusters II
Alien3

around ten years or less from the preceding film --
MiB II and MiB III
Alien Resurrection

There's a point when you should stop making films in a series before you kill the horse... It's already taken too much of a beating and past ready for the glue factory! Do something new already, or alternate good takes on other material....! Yeesh!

This is the mistake corporations always make.
And too often, we accept mediocrity as a consequence.
Just to have that "story" and THOSE "characters" continue.
That's a sad indictment of the audience but still true.

Look what happened to the music industry and all the crap it splurged out over the years... It's a shadow of what it was because of short-sighted thinking and GREED. The music industry pretty much thought they could put anything out on CD or alternate media in stores and people would automatically scoop it up -- at $18 or more per disc. Didn't matter that most CD's had (and still maybe have) only 1-2 decent songs/tracks on them. When Apple/iTunes offered new music for around $1, of course people jumped on it! Record stores are pretty much gone and the business model is being based more and more around digital. They're not even making a quarter of what they used to before iTunes/mp3 became the music delivery standard.

Contrary to what some other people believe, the music industry has never been sadder than it is now and it doesn't look like it will come back. And they're still not smart enough to realize that if you mostly offer crap people will spend their money on something else. You guys may be happy with "X Factor" and "The Voice" but to me it's an indication of how low and accepting of mediocrity we've come in the past quarter-century. There is no guarantee artistry will ever return to the heights it was before the music industry too full of itself and imploded.

Mark my words... They continue this way Hollywood will continue to decline and follow the music industry. It's been going on for quite a while before and after Star Wars was revived in 1997. Star Wars is just the biggest, most obvious target and symptom of what is wrong with studio-/corporate-thinking and decision-making.

Sorry that I can't share your excitement about this news.

And it's a shame pretty much all the studios have come to this INCLUDING and ESPECIALLY Disney which should be above this but as I was reminded by a teacher over a decade ago, Disney IS Hollywood now.

Disney used to be a generator of NEW ideas, not a buyer of other people's companies and films.
The fact they have to spend $4billion and $8billion to get new films into theaters is pathetic...

[Dacey]

And...there was also Mission: Impossible 4, which came out...how many years after the original series? And almost six yeers after the last film in the franchise to boot.

Point being, when done right, old can be new again.

[ohmahaaha]

I don't see any point in being "down" about this news at this point. Let's give them a chance and see what they can do with this. There is every chance that the new movies (and whatever else they may come up with) will be instant classics.

[Ben]

Made me laugh:



(I don't remember Leia's bagels being that big in the original!)

[Randall]

Oh, that was pretty good. I especially liked Cap's remark.

[Ben]

No less than Empire's Lawrence freakin' Kasdan is on board to co-produce and co-write the two episodes after Michael Arndt's Episode VI (he also seems to be exec producing VI).

I have a GOOD feeling about this...!

[Randall]

I still say, this is looking good.

[Dan]

While it has not been made official, it seems that JJ Abrams will indeed direct Episode VII.

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-tal ... 11526.html

[Ben]

While an "interestingly great" choice, I can't but help he's too big and his own brand to be a SW director. SW should be the brand, not any one director, hence why Lucas did not want Spielberg to helm one. It would have then become "A Steven Spielberg Film", not a Star Wars film. I have faith in JJ, but I hope that doesn't happen here.

[Randall]

I'm still mulling over my reaction to this. Not a bad choice, necessarily, but also a little too obvious in a sense. The guy who rebooted Star Trek gets to do Star Wars? Doesn't show a lot of imagination, does it?

Still, Abrams will do a good job. There were other rumoured directors I liked less then Abrams, but there were also more interesting choices out there.

[James]

I'm more worried about them getting the right writer!

[Vernadyn]

Of the rumored writers to be working on the new Star Wars films, I'm optimistic about Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan. However, that optimism is severely tempered by the involvement of Simon Kinberg, who has yet to write a good, or even OK film.