Disney's Star Wars

The news just broke that Disney has paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm, the production company that is responsible for the Indiana Jones franchise and, of course, Red Tails. Buried somewhere in there is news that an obscure relic of the New Hollywood, something called Star Wars (1977), was also thrown in to sweeten the deal.

Kidding aside, I'm pretty stunned--primarily that Lucas would sell something he's spent his whole life working to have such tight control over. And, as a Disney scholar, I'm increasingly intrigued by Bob Iger's aggressive moves lately to buy out at any cost potentially competing (masculine) entertainment brand names (Pixar and Marvel, for example). From a studio standpoint, this is shaping up to be the most interesting period in the history of the company since Katzenberg bolted in the mid-1990s.

This also strikes me as a continuation of Disney's attempt to commodify `80s nostalgia in the age of transmedia storytelling--the heart of modern fandom. This is the same impulse which led to the otherwise inexplicable TRON: Legacy a couple of years ago. I haven't quite put my finger on it just yet (though this is partially what I'm trying to do with my current project, Haunted Nerves), but Disney's obsession with owning Star Wars seems to be more about the past--or repackaging the past--as it does about the future of either brand name.

Ironically, I spent much of today prepping tomorrow's lecture on Disney's convoluted relationship to the science-fiction genre in Star Wars' wake--namely, The Black Hole (1979), and TRON (1982). Its a little known fact that Disney passed on Star Wars in the early 1970s when Lucas first approached them with the idea. A proud, card-carrying member of the Baby Boomer/Davy Crockett generation, Lucas understood the value of Disney's ability to both promote a brand name and to exploit ancillary merchandising markets to maximum effect. So, they made sense for Star Wars.

But, precisely because Disney understood the value of those revenue streams (i.e., toys), and the value of absolute control over their intellectual property, they weren't willing to do a "partnership" with some upstart filmmaker. So, by the end of the 1970s, Disney found itself playing catch-up just like everyone else in the industry. In a sense the news today is the culmination of Disney's many attempts to atone for that mistake over the last four decades.

Somewhere, 20th Century Fox has got to be pissed.