George Lucas talks about Disney Star Wars and giving it up…

Four years ago Disney CEO Bob Iger released a book and in it, he discussed the Disney purchasing of Lucasfilm and, more importantly, Star Wars from George Lucas and he didn’t come off too well in how he treated Lucas.

“We made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines he’d laid out,” Iger wrote.

“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. 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.”

He finished, saying: “George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”

And look, aside from The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker both being terrible, totally misunderstanding, among other things, Luke Skywalker, a lot of the animosity for Disney Star Wars was born right there… the way Lucas was treated, was a reflection on how they felt about the fans.

Now, four years later, the creator himself, George Lucas, has spoken about the whole ordeal at Cannes and, thankfully, he seems to be more ok with it than a lot of fans still are to this day.

“I’m a stubborn guy and I didn’t want people to tell me how to make my movies,” Lucas explains when it comes to how he made movies back in the 70s and 80s.

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Talking about the days when he, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg were forever changing the way movies were made, the sort of movies that were being made and cared more about the art than the money coming in: “We weren’t really that interested in making money, we were interested in making movies.”

Imagine making movies for the passion of it… a time when movies like Jaws, The Godfather, Star Wars or Indiana Jones were king, a time before the dark times, before the empire.

But is the empire here Disney? (Yes, it is, just so we’re clear) Could they really know Star Wars the way Lucas did? The way the real fans did?: “I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was… who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The Force, for example, nobody understood the Force,” Lucas said. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”

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The ideas weren’t lost, they were scrapped, six movies into the saga he created, Disney – and Iger – scrapped Lucas’ ideas, his characters and his legacy. But Lucas has learned to lean into it more now: “[The new Star Wars projects have] a lot of talent, great ideas and production… I feel like they come from my children, and sometimes it hurts a little when they grow up and get away from you.”

I really enjoy a lot of Disney Star Wars but yes, the sting is still there, the world that Lucas created, the legacy, the story, the characters that helped form my and so many others’ childhoods and later lives, plundered for what? Money? Yes, that’s a big part of it but there’s something even more rotten behind it all, I think… but maybe that’s something for another day.

I’d take Lucas back in a second but, I guess second-rate Star Wars is still Star Wars, right? And there are still people who care about Lucas’ legacy working at Disney – Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau and Sam Witwer to name three.

But yeah, I hate me a bit too.

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Source: THR