Wednesday 31 October 2012

Disney scoop up Star Wars

A bit late out of the block on this one (dam you work) but as most will have read Disney have bought the rights to Star Wars from Gorge Lucas for around $4.05bn (around £2.5bn). News straight out of the block is that they intend to produce a new Star Wars film episode 7 by 2015, although what era of the Star Wars universe it will be set in hasn’t been mentioned. Personally I would like to see a story on how the Jedi and Sith were formed, rather than more tales of known characters or god forbid a remake of the original.
Disney will pay around half the money in cash and the rest in Disney shares around 40 million in total. This is the 3rd major deal Disney have done in recent years, in 2006 they bought Pixar for around $7.4bn and in 2009 Marvel Comics were snapped up for a mere $4.2bn.
However some fans are not happy saying that the franchise will be ruined now Disney has its hands on it, these fans clearly haven’t seen episode 1 or have conveniently forgotten about it.
British actor Simon Pegg joked “I was saying Lucasfilm was a Mickey Mouse outfit back in 1999," he later posted that it was actually good news for Star Wars fans.
The UK Disney podcast The Dibb is reporting that Disney are planning a new Start Wars style theme park which would make sense, as at the moment Star Wars is just one of many attractions in the Disney Movie Theme park.
Given that the Disney Star Wars weekends are very popular a bespoke park could prove to be a gold mine, add to that Disney now have the Marvel characters and you could create a rather exciting theme park similar in feel to Universal Island of Adventure.

Although give the experience I had in Disney a few years back they will need to improve on their customer relations if they want to keep the hordes of Star Wars fans happy, we were in the Disney movie park when some of the Star Wars characters were having photos taken with fans. The queue for Darth Vader was ridiculously long so I decided just to take a few photos of the man in-between changing kids, as I prepared to do this one of the Storm Troopers came up and said only official photos could be taken and asked me to stop.
I jokingly waved my hand in front of him and said ‘’I am not the photographer you are looking for’’, he clearly had no idea what I was on about or just had no sense of humour and again told me not to take photos. I politely informed him that as I had spent £530 on two five day park tickets I thought I was entitled to take a few snaps, but if he wanted to push it I was prepared to go all Jedi on him (it had been a long and hot day). ‘’Well just be quick then and don’t let anyone see you’ he said as he turned and walked away, I’m not sure if it was my Jedi mind trick finally kicking in or he didn’t see the point in arguing whatever the reason the family friendly face of Disney was sorely missing that day.


1 comment:

  1. Yeah, I was away on holiday when this news broke so have only caught up with it recently myself.

    Disney are renowned for being litigious and nowhere near as friendly as they make out; I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to all those fan-made films once Disney's lawyers get up to speed.

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