So Uncle George, facing his twilight years, has finally decided to pass on his legacy (or creative ball and chain) to another similarly benevolent, inventive and commercial-minded relative, Uncle Walt.
News of Disney spending $4.05 billion to acquire George Lucas’ Lucasfilm Ltd spread like wildfire around the blogosphere last night. This buyout may have been met with derision and incessant fanboy anger if Lucas hadn’t already blighted his beloved franchise with those unnecessary and charmless prequels, and subsequently licensed and cross-pollinated his world to seemingly every money-making outlet on the market. The largely pragmatic response from twitter would seem to suggest something else – that ‘A New Hope’ may potentially be in line for this bloated and exhausted franchise.
This sale represents an exciting opportunity for Disney to rights some wrongs, but let’s get one irrefutable issue out of the way right now – they will never revert back to that Star Wars of old, the one which fed our young imaginations and wasn’t afraid to invoke a mesmerising (and wholly welcoming) dark side.
It’s a completely different beast now, but with Lucas relinquishing control (although there appears to be a “creative consultant” clause in the deal) there is undoubtedly an army of filmmakers who came of age during the original trilogy (and subsequent to that) who would love to put their own imprint on that world. Let’s face it, even a Jon Turteltaub Star Wars is a more palatable prospect than another Lucas effort at this current time.
Fingers are also firmly crossed that Disney have plans to widen the scope of the universe. Hopefully future big-screen versions will not be solely dictated by the amount of revenue gained from including familiar faces to ramp up the merchandise, with scant regard to applying any actual narrative logic to the films themselves. It’s doubtful that the triptych of Ford, Hamill and Fisher would be lured back (particularly in this youth-obsessed era), but the adventures of their character’s offspring would be an infinitely more enticing prospect than the previous laboured exploits of ‘lil Darth.
Disney’s handling of previous projects with built-in franchise potential has been shaky to say the least (their own version of a world not dissimilar to that of Lucas’, John Carter, stumbled at the first gate) but Star Wars is a property which they could only have dreamt of owning, before now. It’s firmly ingrained in the world-wide psyche to the extent that it could arguably be considered traditional folklore now, and numerous interpretations and iterations would have been on the cards at a future date, regardless to who owed the rights.
It’s now up to the studio to choose well and to choose carefully with who they want to employ to help mould and forge their own brand identity within the world’s biggest pop culture franchise. A mammoth task for sure, but the force may prove to be equally strong for the Mouse House.
