What do people think the Star Wars franchise would be like if Disney had not bought Star Wars?

-
What do people think the Star Wars franchise would be like if Disney had not bought Star Wars?
Before I give you my answer to the question at hand, let me first make an observation.
It seems to me that Star Wars fans have no understanding of how corporate ownership of a media company works. The impression that I get when I see questions such as “What do people think the Star Wars franchise would be like if Disney had not bought Star Wars?” is that the persons that ask queries like this have a huge chip on their shoulder about George Lucas’s retirement and subsequent sale of his company, Lucasfilm Limited (and all of its subsidiaries and intellectual properties) to The Walt Disney Company.
The Walt Disney Company (aka “Disney”) owns a large number of subsidiary companies which enjoy a great deal of autonomy. I don’t have time to name them all, but here are the most prominent Disney subsidiaries:
  • The American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
  • Marvel Entertainment (which includes Marvel Studios and Marvel Worldwide, Inc.)
  • ESPN
  • And when all the legal  i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed, 21st Century Fox and most of its current assets (except for Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox News) will become a subsidiary of Disney
  • The Jim Henson Company/Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
Generally speaking, with rare exception, no one refers to the aforementioned subsidiaries, which enjoy the same amount of creative autonomy as Lucasfilm, as “Disney.”
In short, Disney has the same type of relationship with Lucasfilm as General Electric used to have with NBC. Strictly “hands off” where creative content and editorial decisionmaking is concerned.
Having said that:
If George Lucas had simply retired in 2012 and handed the keys to the company to his three adopted children, there are several possible scenarios that would have occurred.
Alternative I: The Skywalker Saga would still officially end with Revenge of the Sith, and Lucasfilm Animation goes on to produce a complete Season Six of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. George Lucas remains as executive producer of the series to see the series all the way to its conclusion, and the various story arcs about Darth Maul, Assajj Ventress, and Quinlan Vos see the light of day. The three-episode arc about the kyber crystal on Utapau gets made. Dave Filoni then becomes head of Lucasfilm Animation, while Amanda Lucas appoints her father’s old friend and frequent collaborator, Kathleen Kennedy, as President and CEO of the studio. To keep Lucasfilm creatively relevant and its staff employed, Kennedy announces that Star Wars will continue in stand-alone Anthology films and more animated series. The Expanded Universe is allowed to continue, but it is still officially non-canonical as far as the studio is concerned.
Alternative II: Pretty much most of what actually happened in real life occurs in this one, except Lucasfilm gets purchased by 21st Century Fox rather than Disney. Kathleen Kennedy and Rupert Murdoch announce a Sequel Trilogy that will be loosely based on story treatments written by George Lucas shortly before the sale to Fox, as well as a new animated series that will air on the FX cable network or on the “over the air Fox TV network. Kennedy reorganizes the Lucasfilm Licensing Group that oversees ancillary media products into the Lucasfilm Story Group. The old EU is rebranded as Legends, and all new Star Wars fiction gets folded into the official canon.
Oh, and in this scenario, The Walt Disney Company still ends up owning Lucasfilm after buying 21st Century Fox’s sellable assets.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O.,
Read more

Bolero: The One Movie I Have Seen That I Wish Could Be Erased From My Memory

-
Image
If you could have 1 movie that you’ve seen in the past erased from your memory, what movie would that be and why? That’s easy.  Bolero. © 1984 Cannon Film Group Now, I have seen more than my fair share of movies that, for one reason or another, I don’t enjoy at all or once liked but have changed my mind about as I have grown older.  Me Before You  is an example of the former;  Avatar  and  Midway  are exemplars of the latter. But writer-director John Derek’s softcore porn movie disguised as an “adventure in ecstasy” is still the dumbest, most boring film I ever paid a movie ticket to go see in an actual multiplex. It’s so bad, in fact, that my friends (yes, I went with a coed group of buds from college) and I decided, collectively, that as spectacular as Bo Derek looks naked, she was way too old to play a nubile if naive girl in her 20s. The story was just a barely-there plot woven together around a series of nude scenes (including the obligatory girl-girl scene) that
Read more