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Darth Vader is going to Disney World!

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/disney-buying-lucas-films-for-4-billion/

Four billion seems like the right price.

Thoughts? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It appears like Disney has done well by the fans of Marvel (at least most of them). Does this move make you look forward to Episode 7 even more?

Comments

  1. Until Michael Bay is announced to direct, at which point half of the Nerdverse may spontaneously combust. But for now, yes, quite excited since this is the exciting piece of news in several days.

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  2. More power to him but I'm a little surprised he sold. Could have made at least that keeping the company and letting someone make 7,8,9 under the Lucas banner. That said, Disney is the best possible choice, imo, they have a track record for letting companies do their thing, (pixar, marvel). Curious who they bring in, if they go with one director for 7, 8, 9 or treat it like Potter or the marvel movies with one overarching supervisor but different directors for each. Cautiously excited.

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  3. If Disney stays hands off with the creative directions of the Lucas division the way they have with Pixar and Marvel, it's very likely it will thrive. They've tapped a veteran producer in Kathleen Kennedy to run it so I'm assuming she'll have the same freedom Marvel, Pixar and frequent collaborator Jerry Bruckheimer have.

    Disney's about to become the biggest film juggernaut ever. They can cycle through Star Wars, Pirates, and Marvel films every summer while also producing the quite lucrative Pixar, Disney Animation, and Muppets films. They could also potentially work out a deal for Indiana Jones which is only party controlled by Lucasfilm (Spielberg and Paramount have some rights as well it seems).

    I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see them pick-up one more major intellectual property in the next few years. MGM (James Bond, Rocky) could be a good match and would give the company a few more mature franchises that are still family friendly enough to fit into the overall portfolio.

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  4. Can't wait to search for Hidden Mickeys in SW7!

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  5. THREAD, JACK!~


    Raw rating was a 2.9. Take that, haters!

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  6. Bay's been on the outs with the company since his falling out with Bruckheimer.

    I'll bet they try to bring in a Pixar vet like Brad Bird to helm 7-9 considering the success of The Incredibles and M:I4.

    Fanboys will be throwing out tons of dream directors over the next few weeks/months til we get an announcement and I'm sure everyone from Christopher Nolan to Joss Whedon to David Fincher to Sam Raimi are going to be mentioned.

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  7. Real talk:


    I've never seen a single Star Wars movie in its entirety. I'm not sure why.

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  8. Nobody has. Lucas keeps changing them.


    Just yesterday, he changed Han Solo's response to Princess Leia's "I love you" from "I know." to "PLEASE HELP ME, I DON'T WANNA DIE!!!"

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  9. I have a bad feeling about this...

    Just kidding, I actually don't think this is the worst idea in the world, although it makes Disney the owner of a good chuck of nerd properties. Star Wars Episode VII may end up being the best of them all.

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  10. World Series was over and most of the East Coast was trapped indoors.

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  11. Give me Kingdom Hearts 3.


    The ultimate crossover of Disney, Final Fantasy, Marvel, and Star Wars characters.

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  12. Why?


    I mean, I get that there's a lot of money involved, but the series was done, and pretty much all of the EU stuff was crap. Really don't get the need to make a seventh movie.

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  13. I never saw any of them until a few years ago, and only watched A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back because I didn't get any of the jokes in the Family Guy parodies. Still haven't seen Return of the Jedi yet, and I have absolutely no interest in the 3 prequels.

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  14. As a Star Wars nerd, this is probably for the best. It's impossible to say this kind of thing without coming as "that guy" but I'll do it anyways. Even though Lucas created the whole thing, he's done more damage to his own creation than anyone else.

    As far as actual plot and pacing, they have freedom in what to make Episode 7. They could explore the rest of Luke's life (and fall to the Dark Side and later redemption). They could cover the Thrawn trilogy. Or they could go to the Yuuzhan Vong story.



    I'm pretty excited honestly. Everyone I've talked to about this has expected me to be crying and bitching about how this is the rape of my childhood but honestly...it was the right thing to do.

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  15. A good portion of the east coast was also without power for huge chunks of the night also. No power, no TVs, etc. This is a huge rating for them all things considered. Too bad people saw a show that was the worst of the 3 hour era.

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  16. I was reading comics by flashlight myself.

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  17. Have you played the portable spin-offs? Square's original characters for the series have more or less taken over the damn thing.

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  18. I am a Star Wars nerd to the core (combine that with wrestling and its amazing that I managed to lose my virginity) and I am greeting this with cautious optimism. Considering that the prequels were mostly a letdown (I love episode 3) I think that new blood will be an improvement. I would love to see the Thrawn trilogy on the big screen, but I'm betting we will be served with the Solo and Skywalker kids, probably centering around Jacen's turn to the darkside.

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  19. To me this sounds like a good idea. The earlier Star Wars movies always took a bit of a lighter touch anyways -- something Disney is good at. George Lucas seemed to be a bit of a dry well creatively anyway, and clearly he can't write dialogue and/or has poor judgment in those he hires to write it. Good time to cash out. Even though it's probably not an ideal pairing, it is one that offers some interesting possibilities. The original movies are good but the newer three films were just so-so, certainly not befitting of the reputation of the first three films.

    And hey, Steven Spielberg does a lot of work with Disney and you gotta think he'll want a crack at one of the films down the line.

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  20. Can't say I'm a huge fan of the series myself, although the first three movies are decent little popcorn flicks.

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  21. Definitely an improvement in the ratings with competition being pretty light. They still gotta have some real concern with the hourly fall off though --



    Hour one: 4.31 million
    Hour two: 4.22 million
    Hour three: 3.78 million

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  22. I've seen Star Wars!

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  23. Francis Ford Coppola.

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  24. Why do people care about the ratings? I don't care how many viewers watched Parks and Recreation every week, why do people follow wrestling ratings so closely?

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  25. What were you reading, Dougie?

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  26. Start with the prequels, they're the best of the lot.

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  27. David Cronenberg

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  28. Legends and jla midsummer nightmare and the original manhunter.

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  29. imho,
    The best case scenerio for the the new star wars movies would be a
    jump back into KOTOR era and a great hyper space war series, or a flash
    forward to the skywalker kids era, with say a re ordering of the books,
    say with Thrawn as the bad guy. Any reprisal of skywalker, leia, han et
    al is begging for trouble.(Besides I don't think you can get ford drunk
    enough(or have enough zeroes to temp him) to play han again. Besides
    its not like disney could crap over the property as much as episode I
    and II did anyway. Maybe we'll get some better video games out of it
    now. . .

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  30. It's an indication of how good the programming is. The more people watching, the better the show must be. Especially if the rate of viewership is on the rise.

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  31. I suppose it's different for every person, but personally I'm just a big nerd for business figures and statistics. Making up a big spreadsheet, crunching the numbers and examining trends is kinda fun for me, lame as that may sound. I'm a software engineer though, so I suppose it's not exactly a giant leap in the nerd department lol. It's a totally separate endeavor from my enjoyment in the actual on-screen product. I think where you run into trouble on here is when people seem to be unable to separate the two things.

    I think it just became habit for me back in the late 1990s when that information became so widely available. Prior to that, you really had to dig (or have an Observer Newsletter subscription) to get a lot of numbers. In 1998/1999, it became a damn near obsession for a lot of the online wrestling population, with people discussing not only show or hourly ratings, but at the level of the quarter hours.

    I understand the knee jerk reaction some have to the interest in them though, as people often use them inappropriately. You'll often see people making wild conclusions based on one or two weeks of numbers, which happened a lot back in the day too. Obviously one or two data points are practically useless for making observations, but a body of them can give insight into trends.

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  32. Nothing makes me laugh more than seeing one thumbs down on every post I make within 5 minutes. I'm so important in one of your lives that you check this blog every 5 minutes looking for the opportunity to do that. Keep it up guy. Makes me smile every time.

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  33. Oh my god, this. We'd finally get to see Jabba having sex. And that's what we all want, isn't it?

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  34. Because when wrestling does a bad rating, usually an attempt to improve ratings happen, as opposed to when a television show gets a bad rating, it gets canceled if it doesn't improve.

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  35. It's not me, but I disliked this one just to make you smile.

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  36. Mostly just a holdover from the 90's when we lived and died on that crap.

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  37. Does this mean Leia is a Disney princess now?

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  38. Poor dougie. I gave you a thumbs up to make you feel better. Also isn't it possible it could have been multiple people?

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  39. Nolan if you wanna see lots of slow motion and can't understand what anyone is saying.


    And Raimi if you wanna see Bruce Campbell get his welfare check and get shoehorned into it.

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  40. I'm with you on Brad Bird. Perfect guy to balance out the action-heavy and child-friendly sides of these films.


    On the other hand, if they ever decided to branch out with something a little darker -- a stand-alone Fett film, for example -- I'd love to see Kathryn Bigelow get a shot at this universe.

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  41. Yeah, but can't you just watch and decide if something worked for you or not? Not trying to be a dick, just something that's always perplexed me.

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  42. I haven't read midsummer nightmare in forever. I love Morrison's JLA run, but don't remember much about midsummer nightmare.

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  43. You got chuckles from me on this one.

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  44. More than anything.

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  45. Agreed. Disney has done right by the other companies and I'm very excited to see them take over. George should have handed over the reigns a long time ago.

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  46. I totally get a general interest in statistics, but I think it's gone overboard for some. It doesn't usually bug me, but it seems like over the past few weeks, I see way too many people posting about the ratings and how its spelling the end of the WWE. I guess I'd rather see people actually talking about the product rather than how many people were watching it. It gets tiresome.

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  47. They better not do the Yong, that race can go to hell and die for all I care. Probably still be good, but anyone but them. Classic RA(my stuff is MUCH better than anything anyone esle could come up with so I'll push it to the moon) Salvatore. A properly paced and fleshed out Thrawn series with the right director, not enough snowflakes in the world for that.

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  48. Yeah can understand that for sure, plus people certainly over exaggerate or get carried away. It's pretty much impossible given what little data we have to determine something like that.

    The thing that intrigues me, which I raised in another thread was is if Raw's ratings continue to dwindle, whether or not it will undergo a format change at some point. Good writing can make the difference when people are at least casual viewers of the program or of wrestling, but if they are actually shedding some of their core audience or losing it to other organizations, then you might get into the situation where it doesn't matter how good your writing is if nobody is paying attention.



    I'd be surprised if USA outright cancelled it without making some big adjustments first (back to two hours, format change, etc). The precursor to Raw, Prime Time Wrestling was a big ratings grabber for a long time, but when ratings dropped 50% over a period of two years, they were able to re-work it into Raw. Contrary to popular belief, Raw was not a big hit out of the gate either, which ratings similar to PTW for the first year or so before it started to rise to the level of the stronger PTW years.



    I guess the issue with RAW is -- how do you adjust a program that already best approximates the 'experience' of a wrestling event? In a way, PTW existed out of necessity I'm sure, as it was probably too expensive to produce a live arena show every week and now those limitations don't exist. You can't really put the genie back in the bottle as far as that goes.

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  49. I think he's being facetious, but I agree in any case.

    Watching or not watching something because of it's popularity or lack of popularity shows a lack of critical thinking skills IMO. Children do it because they haven't developed those skills yet, teenagers do it to fit into groups, but adults don't really have an excuse.

    Quality and popularity are sometimes, but not necessarily always interlinked -- especially in the world of movies, music and entertainment. Plenty of hugely popular things are only so because they are dressed up in the shiniest package, while plenty of great things are categorically ignored, because of their off-kilter point of view, their complexity, etc.

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  50. The last featured Tron: Legacy! My head ass-ploded from the awesome!

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  51. Deadspin's Drew Magary pissed in all our cornflakes by suggesting Disney would look to a Taylor Lautner-type to take over the Han Solo role.


    I has a sad.

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  52. It's pretty much Whedon or bust for me when it comes to my interest with the films.

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  53. They should send a fruit basket to Miguel Cabrera for striking out looking.

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  54. 4 Billion sounds like a discount.


    At first I really had no opinion, I was kind of neutral to the idea but I'm starting to warm up to it slowly considering the string of successful movies they've released over the last few years.


    Regardless of what everyone's opinion is I know at least 90 percent of this blog will be standing in line at a Midnight showing(myself included).

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  55. It's kinda like a BoD meme now. Every Dougie post has at least 10 downvotes, no matter what.

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  56. Only if the young mercenary that Bobba is training turns out to be a spy for the rebels, and they have chase through that cloud city on jetpacks which ends in the rebel letting Bobba go and firing his laser into the sky while screaming in bromance agony.

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