In January 2012, George Lucas chose a maroon sofa in his animation studios at Skywalker Ranch, beneath two paintings of Padmé, as the place where he would tell the world he was retiring from Star Wars. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff,” he explained to New York Times freelance reporter Bryan Curtis. Once again, he declared his intention to get back to making personal films. Reporters who’d been around the block a few times raised their eyebrows.
The ostensible subject of the interview was Red Tails, the Tuskegee Airmen biopic Lucas had been struggling to get released with a major studio for years. Naturally, Curtis wanted to know about the prospect for future Star Wars films. If Lucas could make a fifth Indiana Jones, which was supposedly in the works, why not a seventh Star Wars? Lucas’s response was one of the most revealing emotional answers he’d ever given. Years of fan pushback on the prequels, it seems, years of Plinkett and his ilk had gotten to him—and his answer suggested he had been reading more online commentary than he would care to admit. “Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” he blurted to Curtis. (Such online focus, from a man who often claimed to be content with Victorian technology, was also to be found in a later BusinessWeek interview: “With the Internet, it’s gotten very vicious and personal. . . . You just say to yourself, why do I need to do this?”)
Note what Lucas’s answer wasn’t. It wasn’t that he hadn’t even written the barest treatment for Episode VII, as he’d said back at Celebration III. As early as 1999, he’d told Vanity Fair that “I never had a story for the sequels.” By 2008, he was not only ruling out a sequel trilogy from himself, but from his successors at Lucasfilm: “I’ve left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features,” he told Total Film magazine. “There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX. That’s because there isn’t any story. I mean, I never thought of anything!” But by 2012, around the time he was announcing his retirement, Lucas was secretly at work on a new treatment—for Star Wars Episode VII.
Lucas hadn’t ever needed to make more Star Wars, or indeed any at all. He could have made Apocalypse Now back in his salad days and won the approval of his friends. He could have handed the franchise over to Fox in 1977 as planned. He could have left it to the Expanded Universe after the first trilogy was completed. He could have stopped at the prequels. That advice he offered to Simon Pegg—don’t get stuck making the same movie for thirty years—could have been applied to himself even as he gave it. He could have gone off and made personal movies, burning through his Star Wars money the way he said he would.
But Lucas had taken none of these off-ramps. He had kept on making more Star Wars. He started to describe Star Wars as something that was happening to him. “Star Wars obviously snuck up and grabbed me and threw me across the room and beat me against the wall,” he told Jon Stewart in 2010. “It was a very slow process accepting the reality of what happened.” He was hooked, as hooked as any R2 builder or 501st member or lightsaber choreographer. His creation had taken over his life, whether he liked it or not.
Of course, Lucas had a financial incentive to keep Star Wars going. Given how well every Star Wars movie in history had done, it would be hard for even the selfless Creator to not see them as personal piggy banks. Indeed, he briefly discussed the idea of a new Star Wars film with McCallum in the late 2000s, viewing a sequel as a way to fund the production of Underworld. There were plans to rerelease 3-D versions of all six movies which got as far as a 3-D rerelease for Episode I in 2012. It earned a relatively disappointing $22 million during its opening weekend; the least a Star Wars release had made, ever. Episode II was converted into 3-D but never shown outside Celebration Europe. The Clone Wars wasn’t enough. The video games weren’t enough. The Star Wars machine was winding down. Lucas would have to either set about making Episode VII or accept that layoffs were inevitable.
Lucas loved the company; this is why he bore the burden of the Star Wars machine so willingly. This is why he still showed up for work at 7 AM, the way his father had. In more than one interview, he compared his situation to that of Darth Vader, trapped unwillingly by the inner workings of a technological Empire. The Empire was increasingly far-flung—most of the Clone Wars production took place in Singapore—and increasingly difficult to manage.
In particular the games division, LucasArts, was “quite a mess,” in the words of Jim Ward, a marketing manager who took over LucasArts in 2004 and was asked to perform a top-to-bottom audit. The division’s 150 game developers were spending too much time building software engines and not enough on the games themselves. The best titles were outsourced; the Knights of the Old Republic may be widely considered one of the top 100 video games of all time, but that was largely thanks to the Canadian company that designed and built it, BioWare. LucasArts was reduced to distribution and marketing.
Hal Barwood, after an epiphany on the set of Dragonslayer in 1981, had walked away from moviemaking and followed his passion for game design. He came to LucasArts in 1990, just in time to design Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, only the second time Lucas had allowed the company to develop a game based on his property (computer game graphics had reached a point where he was no longer embarrassed by them; besides, Atari still held the Star Wars license). The future had seemed bright.
But over the next decade, Barwood watched his division slide downhill, hampered in particular by an increasing reliance on Star Wars games. “The marketing department, if it didn’t have Star Wars on it, they didn’t know what to do,” he says. The company had found critical, if not commercial success with smart, witty adventure games such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. But the lure of Star Wars lucre had been impossible to resist, and haphazard development had torn LucasArts apart. Barwood, who quit in 2003, had ten different bosses in thirteen years: “George would get rid of them, or they’d leave,” he says. “Nobody ever took control.”
Not until Jim Ward and his ruthless 2004 audit. An overhaul of LucasArts was promised; in the end it boiled down to firing more than half the staff when the team moved into the Presidio. In 2010, after Ward himself had been ousted, another third of LucasArts was laid off.
The remainder worked like crazy on Star Wars 1313, the companion game to the canceled TV show Underworld. While Underworld scripts sat on a shelf, Star Wars 1313 soldiered on as a role-playing game set in the same dark, gritty part of Coruscant. You played a bounty hunter, and the content of the game felt more mature, more like Empire Strikes Back. Perhaps this would be even better than Knights of the Old Republic; perhaps it would be the title that would win video game critics over to the notion that Star Wars games could be just as good as all that other content. But in 2012, just as LucasArts was preparing to show two years’ worth of work on 1313, Lucas declared that he wanted to change it all around—he wanted the game to be about Boba Fett instead. This was a prime example, said one employee, of the fact that Lucas was “used to being able to change his mind” and “didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with” such casual mind-changing would become.
As he paddled around trying to keep Lucasfilm afloat on a shrinking pool of revenue, Lucas would have looked longingly at the success of Pixar, an ocean liner by comparison. Lucas still called Pixar “my company.” Originally called the Lucas Computer Division, Pixar had essentially started off as a skunkworks operation, and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had bought it in 1986, in a postdivorce fire sale. Lucas had been desperate to unload assets in order to hang onto Skywalker Ranch and sacrificed the computer division on the altar of that utopian dream. Jobs gave him $5 million—way less than Lucas had been asking, but at just the right time—and promised to invest another $5 million in the new company, soon to be dubbed Pixar after one of the computers it had been developing. It took a while, but Jobs was eventually convinced to turn the company around, from selling $125,000 computers and specialized software to creating animated movies with that software instead.
The man who persuaded him was John Lasseter, an animator who had been fired from Disney Studios in 1981—interestingly enough, after declaring it his ambition to bring “Star Wars-level quality to the art of animation.” When one of Lasseter’s animated shorts won an Oscar in 1988, Disney CEO Michael Eisner belatedly tried to hire Lasseter back. Lasseter turned him down and went on to direct Toy Story in 1995. Bob Iger, Eisner’s successor, snapped up Lasseter and the results of Lasseter’s work in 2006 for $7.6 billion as one of his first acts; the board let Eisner speak out against the sale, but ultimately overruled his stern objections. For Disney, ignoring Lasseter’s Star Wars–based desire turned out to be one of its more costly mistakes. For Jobs, it led to a 1,520 percent return on the millions he’d given Lucas.
For Lucas, that had to sting—especially given his lifelong love of animation. But he also noticed that after Jobs sold Pixar, Disney treated it like the crown jewels. Everything about the company, from its culture to its intense collaborative storytelling meetings, was to be run just as it was under Jobs. Lasseter was to become Disney’s chief creative officer, and Ed Catmull, whom Lucas had hired to start his computer division way back in 1979, would be the head of Disney animation. It had all the hallmarks of a reverse takeover. Meanwhile, Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, the former bakery whose architectural reconstruction Jobs had poured as much of himself into as Lucas had into Skywalker Ranch, remained effectively independent from the rest of the Mouse House. By 2011, Pixar had produced two of its three top-grossing movies of all time—Toy Story 3 and Up—as part of the Disney family.
In August 2009, some three years after he bought Pixar, Disney CEO Iger made his second surprise acquisition: Marvel, maker of comic books Lucas had been reading since the 1960s, the company that admitted it had been saved from its tail-spin in the late 1970s by the Star Wars comic. Despite losing the Star Wars license, Marvel had roared back in the late 1990s, when the company made the leap to the silver screen with the X-Men trilogy and Spider Man; now it was worth $4 billion to Disney. Once again, critics suspected it was overvalued (after all, the X-Men and Spider Man franchises were both licensed to other movie studios; Disney couldn’t use them). Once again, the supposedly overvalued company was left to run its own business, and once again, it found a string of box office successes (most notably the Iron Man series and The Avengers, which became the third highest grossing movie in history). And once again, there was a prominent Star Wars influence: Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, was obsessed with the original trilogy and had gone to USC specifically because it was Lucas’s alma mater.
If Iger had intended for his acquisitions to get George Lucas’s attention, he could have picked no two better companies to buy than Pixar and Marvel. These were companies Lucas loved—and one that he had birthed himself—and he could see that Iger was willing to let them retain their respective idiosyncrasies. Disney also was clearly on the hunt for powerful characters with deep ties to the now-dominant nerd culture; with the Marvel deal it had just bought a universe with five thousand of them. Lucasfilm had many thousands more than that in the Holocron.
Iger had known George Lucas since 1991, when Iger was head of ABC TV and commissioned Young Indiana Jones. Lucas turned sixty-five in 2009; the chances of him staying on at Lucasfilm for as long as Iger was contracted into his job—until 2015—were slim. By then Lucas would be seventy-one. From the outside, he already seemed uninterested in running the Star Wars hit machine any more, at least not beyond a single animated TV show.
And there was something else Iger knew about Lucas. After all these years, George had fallen in love again, and he’d fallen hard. Her name was Mellody Hobson; she was the chair of DreamWorks Animation, president of a $9 billion Chicago investment firm, and a friend of the Obamas. Lucas met her at a business conference in 2006. While very little is known about their relationship—least of all which conference that was—Lucas has indicated that they began dating around 2008. By 2009, Lucas let her meet the artists on the third floor at Skywalker Ranch. She burst in gleefully: “Hello boys, it’s take your girlfriend to work day.”
But before Lucas popped the question to Mellody, he would have to decide what to do with the advances of a most persuasive suitor of his own: the Walt Disney Corporation.
Iger popped the question to Lucas on May 20, 2011. Lucas had just turned sixty-seven a week earlier.
The two men had come together at Disney World to inaugurate the second version of Star Tours. Lucas had decided to change everything about the ride, to make it new. Prior to 2011, the ride had been set during Return of the Jedi and called the Endor Express; you could call this upgraded version the Everywhere Express. The simulator could offer segments in eleven locations in the Star Wars universe, which in random combination would lead, Disney boasted, to fifty-four distinct Star Wars experiences. It was set between Episodes III and IV and thus would now feature characters, scenes, and planets from the prequel trilogy. The cultural shift in what constituted Star Wars was assured at Disney, with which Lucasfilm had been working on the ride since 2006.
Lucas and Iger had a packed schedule ahead of them that day. They had to appear at the opening ceremony for the ride, which was to be a scripted spectacular. Here’s how it would go down: Emcee Anthony Daniels, alongside Chris Bartlett—contractually unacknowledged inside his Threepio costume—would welcome visitors. Stormtroopers would then invade the set, clearing the way for Darth Vader. Two Jedi would be seen on the screen racing through Disney World to save everybody from the Empire, lightsabers drawn to draw the blaster fire, faces covered in robe hoods. The screen Jedi would appear to run up to the doors of the stage. “Reveal yourselves, Jedi,” Vader would say, and out would come Iger and Lucas, brandishing lightsabers. “Prepare to meet your Maker,” Iger would tell Vader, indicating Lucas. Pause for audience laughter.
Vader would insist Iger and Lucas didn’t have the power necessary to remove the energy shield he’d placed around Disney World. “Don’t worry,” Lucas was to say, his only scripted words in this whole unusual bit. “Artoo will know what to do.”
With their lines securely in their heads, Iger and Lucas met for breakfast at the Hollywood Brown Derby, a complete replica of a famous old Tinseltown landmark restaurant. If one was trying to woo George Lucas, where else would one take him but a replica restaurant that evoked nostalgia, glory days, the glitter of movie history past? Iger did everything but get down on one knee with an R2-D2 wedding ring.
The men were dining alone; one of the perks of running Disney is you get to close down restaurants in theme parks and eat in them at will. Lucas ordered the omelet, Iger the parfait. Then, with the wait staff out of earshot, the Disney boss turned to business. Would Lucas ever consider selling his company?
Lucas played it cool. (Pay attention, would-be fiancés with cold feet.) “I’m not ready to pursue that now,” Lucas said. “But when I am, I’d love to talk.”
The seed planted, the pair headed out for the morning’s festivities. When the big reveal came and the Jedi team strolled on stage, Lucas held his lightsaber casually, one hand in his jeans pocket. Iger held his two-handed with stiff shoulders, as if cradling something very fragile.
What was Lucas waiting for? Star Tours was complete. Clone Wars was chugging along under the watchful eye of Filoni. There was no other major Star Wars production on Lucasfilm’s plate.
But that was precisely the problem. Lucas didn’t just want to hand over his intellectual property to Disney—or any other investor, for that matter—with only a skeleton crew to keep the franchise running. Because Paramount owned the rights to distribute the Indiana Jones movies, that series was considered “revenue neutral” to the lawyers. Star Wars was pretty much the only asset Lucasfilm had. Even after all these years, the company was really still the Star Wars Corporation.
No, if Lucas was going to sell Lucasfilm, it would be the spiffiest Special Edition–style Lucasfilm it could possibly be. It was time to change everything around and make it new, one last time.
Step 1: secure a successor. Lucas said he “ruminated on it endlessly” until the answer occurred to him: Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg’s long-time production partner and one of the most accomplished producers in Hollywood. There was no other candidate. “Why didn’t I see this before?” Lucas would recall thinking. “She’s always been standing right there in front of me.” The two met for lunch in New York; after catching up on family and friends, Lucas told her he was “moving pretty aggressively” to retire. Would she be willing to take the reins at Lucasfilm—and to potentially help him hand it over to another company?
Kennedy didn’t need much time, if any, to think about it. “Once I realized what he’d said, I answered pretty quickly,” she says. “I kind of surprised myself.” She’d never seen herself running a studio. She already ran a successful production company with her husband, Frank Marshall: Amblin Entertainment, which they had cofounded with Spielberg and through which they had produced his movies ET: The Extraterrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Lincoln, along with a host of other films by directors like Martin Scorsese and J. J. Abrams. Amblin had produced a lot of movies with Disney and its subsidiaries, too. Kennedy accepted on the spot: it would “afford me the ability to take my skills and be part of something bigger,” she said. New Star Wars movies were “something bigger” than every blockbuster motion picture she’d been involved in thus far.
Step 2 for Lucas: pop the old ship back into hyperspace. “I’ve got to build this company up so it functions without me,” Lucas later said he thought at the time, “and we need to do something to make it attractive.” And one surefire way to doll up Lucasfilm would be to get a few more Star Wars films into the rotation.
Lucas had stated explicitly that Episodes VII, VIII, and IX were not to be made. He’d never really thought of any stories for them. But how hard would it be to whip up a few more little space things? So one evening, casually, on the phone to his son, Jett, during dinner, Lucas revealed he was writing again. That’s good, said Jett, who knew his father was happiest when he had his head in a creative project. Your personal movies, right? No, said Lucas. More Star Wars. “Wait,” said Jett. “Back up. What?” Even the Creator’s son believed Star Wars movies were over.
Lucas called the old gang: Hamill, Ford, and Fisher. Negotiations commenced. Fisher, who had been told to lose ten pounds to play Leia in 1976, agreed to lose thirty-five pounds to play her this time around. Empire and Jedi screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who had refused to help Lucas rewrite Episode I, was brought on board as a consultant, although he was not initially slated to cowrite Episode VII. Lucas wanted a younger screenwriter: Michael Arndt. He had independent movie bona fides; Arndt was so aggressively independent, in fact, that he had been fired as the writer of his first movie, Little Miss Sunshine, which he had sold to Fox Searchlight. (He was later rehired.) Lucas had to admire Arndt’s tenacity and the award-winning mix of drama and comedy it had yielded—not to mention the fact that the last scene of the movie was written just weeks before the premiere. Clearly, this was a man after Lucas’s heart. Arndt had also been the main writer on the top-grossing Pixar movie of all time, Toy Story 3. He was a known quantity at Disney.
By June 2012, Lucas was finally willing to take the next step. Kennedy was announced as cochair of Lucasfilm on June 1. She had watched Lucas agonizing over whether he was ready. Now he was. He picked up the phone and called Iger.
Immediately, lawyers and accountants began combing Lucasfilm’s property to assess its worth—and to make absolutely certain that Lucas actually owned everything he thought he owned in the Star Wars universe. Up to twenty lawyers at the LA office of Skadden Arps went through the surreal process of making files on 290 “primary characters” from the Star Wars universe, from Admiral Ackbar to the bounty hunter Zuckuss. It wasn’t that anyone was seriously questioning whether Lucas owned the rights to these characters. But crackpot claims had been made over the years, and due diligence had to be done. The firm plugged away at it throughout July and August; they scrutinized chains of title dating all the way back to the days when United Artists or Universal could have bought into the franchise for a song but didn’t.
The investigators quickly gave each character a code name, because the buzz in the office was already beginning. The head of the office, Brian McCarthy, had helped shepherd Disney’s purchase of Pixar. This experience was different. “I was shocked by how many people knew the intricacies of whose father-in-law was married to whose sister,” McCarthy told the Hollywood Reporter. Even after all these years, even in Hollywood, power players could still be shocked by how widely, intimately known the franchise had become.
At Disney, Iger confided to his direct reports that while they didn’t have a deal yet, they were close. Nothing was to leak. “Trust became important,” Iger said in 2013. Trust had always been important at Lucasfilm, which was used to the lockdown atmosphere. Indeed, the company was able to simultaneously work on new movies and the Disney deal, both in secret. Kennedy was running a small story development team. With notable exceptions, nobody was told of the impending deal—though staffers certainly had their suspicions. A hiring freeze and a marketing freeze were put in place by September 2012. “The writing was on the wall,” said social media manager Bonnie Burton. “We were getting reorganized constantly. There was talk behind closed doors that was pretty loud. I kind of thought Disney was going to buy us, because the only other people who could afford Lucasfilm were, like, Sony or Microsoft.”
Some Lucasfilm employees knew more than others. Leland Chee, keeper of the Holocron, first got curious when he was asked to come up with a definitive number of characters in his database. Brand communications manager Pablo Hidalgo was told of the sale in advance: he’d just finished a mammoth book, The Essential Reader’s Guide, which covered every Star Wars novel and short story ever published, and was now tasked with strange little assignments to explain Star Wars inellectual property. What he didn’t know was that there was a whole lot of new intellectual property coming down the pike.
Then, on June 29, 2012, Hidalgo was brought into a meeting with his boss, Miles Perkins. Ostensibly, the meeting’s purpose was to update the company’s “messaging” to its fans. And why was messaging being updated?, Hidalgo wondered. “We’re making seven, eight, and nine,” Perkins said casually.
Hidalgo needed to sit down. He guessed his reaction was being gauged. And when it came, he says, his reaction was “something that’s unprintable”—presumably spoken through a giant smile.
Star Wars was back from the dead. Again.
There was just one hitch. Lucas was refusing to give Iger any treatments for Episodes VII, VIII, and IX before the deal closed. They would be great; Disney would just have to trust him. Disney wanted to trust, but it also wanted to verify Lucas’s assurances that the treatments were solid—or indeed that there were treatments in the works at all. The company easily could have dug up claims that Lucas had made on multiple occasions, one of them in front of thousands of people, about never having written any such treatments.
But Lucas was playing hardball. “Ultimately you have to say, ‘Look, I know what I’m doing,’” he told BusinessWeek. “‘Buying my stories is part of what the deal is.’ I’ve worked at this for 40 years, and I’ve been pretty successful. I mean, I could have said, ‘Fine, well, I’ll just sell the company to somebody else.’”
Lucas didn’t relent until he got, in writing, an agreement on the broad outlines of the deal. He was to get forty million shares of Disney stock and another $2 billion in cash. Even then, Lucas also had to have it in writing that the treatments he’d cobbled together could only be seen by three people at Disney—Bob Iger, new chair Alan Horn, and VP Kevin Mayer.
Iger’s reaction to the treatments was muted. “We thought from a storytelling perspective they had a lot of potential,” he told BusinessWeek. For a man well versed in marketing, that was either a deliberate underselling or the most damning faint praise in Disney history. Either way, it would have been hard to quit the deal at that point, with an agreement in writing and a full evaluation sweep going on at Lucasfilm. And it would be no skin off Lucas’s back to turn round and sell the whole spruced-up company to someone else. Besides, even if the treatments were wretched, no Star Wars movie had ever failed to make a killing.
With the deal nearing, activity at both companies reached a fever pitch by October 2012. Bob Iger watched the six Star Wars movies back to back in a weekend and took notes. Kathleen Kennedy convinced Howard Roffman to come out of semiretirement and manage the coming explosion in licensing—it was, after all, always the consumer products division of Lucasfilm that minted the most money. Between October 11 and 14, during some tense phone calls from New York Comic-Con, Hidalgo learned that the sale was a go. He emailed “Star Wars” Insider to get it to hold its front cover. He couldn’t tell them why—yet.
On Friday, October 19, 2012, George Lucas sat down to film what would be, in a way, his final feature as head of the company that bore his name. This time he would not be behind the camera but in front of it, along with Kathleen Kennedy. His aim was to officially pass the torch but also to get ahead of the story—and to remove all need to do TV interviews about the announcement by shooting an extensive conversation with the principals involved, a conversation he would then give freely to the world. It was to be one last triumph of media management for Lucasfilm before its landscape changed forever.
Lynne Hale, Lucasfilm’s PR chief, would oddly play an uncredited role in the interview, asking smiling questions in the style of a TV anchor. The whole thing was to be edited down to about half an hour and released in five short episodes on YouTube.
As the camera rolled, Lucas talked about the media giant to which he was selling his company almost like it was a nuclear bunker. Disney was “the steadiest of all the studios,” he said, a place where the Star Wars legacy could survive for generations. He praised the company for “nurturing a brand, licensing, that whole package of keeping them on a steady footing.” It was almost like Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction series Foundation, a favorite of Lucas’s, in which a visionary plots out the thousand-year future of his civilization. Lucas foresaw Kennedy picking her own successor, still backed by the strength of the Mouse House. “Ultimately,” said Lucas, “when it’s the end of the world and we’re all going to die, the last thing to go will be Disney.”
Like Obi-Wan telling Luke that what he’d been told about Darth Vader was true from a certain point of view, Lucas found a loophole in his earlier claims that there would be no more Star Wars movies. “I always said I wasn’t going to do any more, and that’s true, because I’m not going to do them,” he said. (Those “explicit instructions” he’d mentioned in 2008 had apparently gone by the wayside.) “That doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to turn it over to Kathleen to do more.” The loophole, apparently, was the exact size and shape of one of the best producers in the business.
And where would Lucas be in this picture? An adviser, “my Yoda on my shoulder,” in Kennedy’s phrase. The “keeper of the flame” of Star Wars. The old Jedi in a cave whom the warrior turns to when her question is too important and all other options have been exhausted. Would this mean that Lucas was to still be, in some shadowy way, in charge of the Star Wars saga? Ponder how many of the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi could be said to be Yoda’s doing, and there you’ll have your answer. (Not a lot—just the training that led to the key moment.)
Lucas, fascinated by education, is uniquely suited to the task of mentoring younger directors. It was what he had done for Dave Filoni on The Clone Wars; it was what he would do again, in far more of an advisory capacity, for J. J. Abrams. Kennedy would recruit Abrams away from the Star Trek franchise in January 2013 with four simple words: “Please do Star Wars.” Abrams, the once and future Star Wars nerd, pulled strings at Paramount so he could comply. Later in 2013, Jett Lucas would reveal that his father was talking to Abrams “all the time.”
That doesn’t make Abrams the next Richard Marquand. He’s more strong-willed and far more experienced than the Welsh director, for one thing, and for another, Lucas has genuine reason to want to step back gracefully into the shadows, back behind the scenes at last, and to sit, quite literally, in the back row. Perhaps the most touching moment in the PR film comes when the old Jedi reveals the great price of his mastery: he never had a chance to see his epic the way most of us did. “The one thing I missed in life is that I never got to see Star Wars,” he said. “I never got that moment when I walked into a theater and was blown away, because I already knew it was nothing but heartache and problems.” George James Sr., Navajo Code Talker, and George Lucas Jr. had something in common, then: neither of them had ever really seen this classic film.
After the New York Stock Exchange closed on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, this announcement was pushed out on Disney’s website: “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.” It offered a few obligatory paragraphs of hyperbole, and the rest was written in standard press-release-ese. “Acquisition continues Disney’s strategic focus on creating and monetizing the world’s best branded content,” read the subhead. The galaxy far, far away became just another piece of branded content, belonging to the world’s largest media company.
The price was exactly $4.05 billion as of that day’s Disney share price. The terms of the deal were half stock, half cash. $2 billion in a virtual suitcase and forty million Disney share certificates, all of it handed to Lucasfilm Ltd.’s one and only shareholder, George Walton Lucas Jr., son of a stationery store owner. $4.05 billion: Star Wars was not worth as much as the $7 billion for Pixar, then, and only a hair’s breadth more than the price paid for Marvel. $4.05 billion is more than the GDP of Fiji. And yet it may seem a somewhat deflating number to appraise this property at, given the $30 billion of revenue Star Wars generated in its first thirty-five years.
Like Lucasfilm, Disney had made a video, and it got its version out first. Iger had prepared a speech for the film, after which Lucas responded to offscreen questions. In the video, Iger pointed out that his $4.05 billion was paying for seventeen thousand characters (the number Leland Chee had determined resided in the Holocron)—though he neglected to say that the vast majority of them were minor characters in novels.
Iger also sought to reassure investors about the wisdom of dropping such a hefty sum on a single company by soothingly mentioning his other new crown jewels: ILM and Skywalker Sound. On a conference call the day of the announcement, he played up the smart financial aspects of the deal. Those forty million shares he had granted Lucas? Iger would be issuing them anew and intended to buy back that many shares before the new Star Wars arrived in 2015. He didn’t mention that Disney had had $4.4 billion sitting in the bank and investors demanding they do something with it. Only $2 billion of that had gone to Lucas in cash; the rest was delivered in stock. Disney still had the capacity to swallow another Lucasfilm whole.
Investors weren’t so sure about the whole deal. Disney stock fell amid heavy trading the day after the announcement, to $47 a share. In the immediate aftermath of the news there seemed to be a certain sense of dazed dismay in the mainstream media and in Star Wars fandom. “I felt a great disturbance in the Twittersphere,” I tweeted at the time, “as if a million childhoods suddenly cried out and were silenced.” But it didn’t take long for me to realize I was wrong: the deal made sense, even for fans. There would be more Star Wars, funded by some very deep pockets. Look at how Disney treated Pixar and Marvel: reverentially. Look at who would be directing the next movies: not the director of the prequels. I wrote “Star Wars Just Got a New Lease on Life,” the first positive op-ed piece published in the deal’s wake. The next day, it was shared twenty thousand times on Facebook alone; it seemed I wasn’t the only fan to feel a mounting sense of excitement once they weighed everything up.
Lucas, unusually for him, was more upbeat than that. He even cracked a smile. In his interview, the Creator emphasized that he’d been a big fan of Disney “from when I was born.” He offered his final rationalization for abandoning his hopes of making more experimental films: “I couldn’t drag my company into that.” (A company that, by the way, was like a “mini-Disney . . . constructed similarly.”) “Disney is my retirement fund,” he said dryly. Which was something of an understatement: Lucas was now the second-largest private shareholder of Disney stock after Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The kid who got to go to Disneyland on day 2 in 1955, who had revered Uncle Scrooge, who wanted Disney to back Star Wars in the first place, who had kept two Mickey Mouse bookends on his desk all these years, now owned 2 percent of the company.
The retirement fund would continue to rise and fall for the next two months, as Disney was buffeted by uncertainties in the market. But in January 2013, as Wall Street learned that J. J. Abrams was about to be announced as Episode VII director, the company’s stock began a remarkable rise. On May 14, 2013—Lucas’s sixty-ninth birthday—Disney stock would hit a high of 67.67. The present for the man who had everything? Stock that was worth $840 million more than when he first received it.
It was an end of an era, to be sure—but Star Wars was living on, and not just in the bank account of its Creator. In the PR video that Disney had released around the time of the acquisition announcement, Lucas talked about the future of Star Wars films. He casually referred to episodes VII, VIII, and IX collectively as “the end of the trilogy”—by which he presumably meant the trilogy of trilogies, which hadn’t really existed until he’d finally decided to send over some treatments. “And other films also,” he added—as usual, casually dropping a twist into the whole narrative at the last minute and, as usual, choosing wonderfully wooden words. This was the first mention of stand-alone Star Wars movies that would hit screens in the years between episodes.
“We have a large group of ideas and characters and books and all kinds of things,” said the Creator. “We could go on making Star Wars for the next hundred years.”