“Star Wars” is among the most iconic pop culture franchises in the world. Since its debut in the 1970s, George Lucas’s space opera has expanded to encompass multiple television shows and over nine feature-length movies. Disney has owned and directed the franchise since it acquired LucasArts in 2012. Despite the monumental success, there’s one main thing that George Lucas regrets about the franchise.
According to an interview with George Lucas from 2015, the biggest thing he regrets is selling the rights to the story to Disney. The deal garnered a return of over $4 billion for the folks behind Lucasfilm Ltd. However, Lucas told Charlie Rose that his vision for “Star Wars” and what Disney wanted for the franchise were very different.
“They decided they didn’t want to use those stories; they decided they were going to do their own thing,” Lucas told Rose, referring to the story treatments he’d already created for the last three movies.
Lucas elaborated on his thoughts about Disney’s purchase of “Star Wars” by noting that he thought of the stories as “his kids,” and that selling was difficult, especially when he looked back and thought about who he had sold the franchise to. News networks ran with Lucas’s comment that he had “sold them to the white slavers that take these things,” which was said in jest but sharply worded nonetheless.
Getting rid of the ‘kids’
It’s important to note that while he regrets selling “Star Wars” to Disney, Lucas says it was still the choice he had to make in the moment. “I knew there were three more stories. And I knew… to do it right was probably going to take about 10 years,” he told Charlie Rose. “I’m 70. I don’t know whether I’ll be here when I’m 80.”
Lucas also mentioned that he had other things he wanted to do — other ventures he wanted to pursue — and it seems keeping “Star Wars” to himself would have inhibited those ventures. Lucas also discussed how his and Disney’s visions for the “Star Wars” story differed, highlighting how it was always meant to be more of a generational family story than what it became in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which introduced a slew of plot problems.
While he might regret selling “Star Wars” to Disney, it’s unlikely fans will run out of “Star Wars” anytime soon. Disney has big plans for the universe, with numerous movies and TV shows in the works.
