Disney CEO Bob Iger is in the news again today, though this time it has nothing to do with the upcoming Disney+ streaming service. Rather it’s due to the new memoir ‘Ride of a Lifetime’ that he just released in which he talks about his time at the Mouse House.
Along with discussing the acquisitions of companies such as Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, he also touched upon the way he upset “Star Wars” creator George Lucas – first by not using Lucas’ original outlines for the current trilogy, and second by J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” film itself.
Iger says in the book (via CNet) that Kathleen Kennedy, J.J Abrams, and Michael Arndt met with Lucas to discuss their plans for ‘The Force Awakens’ and Lucas immediately got upset when it became clear that the story they had planned wasn’t similar to his outlines:
“George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded.
I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better. I should have prepared him for the meeting with J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction. I could have talked through this with him and possibly avoided angering him by not surprising him.
Now, in the first meeting with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”
That only deepened when Lucas was screened “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and bluntly said he wasn’t a fan of the movie. At that point though it wasn’t because they didn’t use his outlines, but rather that the film played it far too safe and Iger explains that there was a reason for that:
“Just prior to the global release, Kathy screened The Force Awakens for George. He didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s nothing new,’ he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, ‘There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.’
He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars. We’d intentionally created a world that was visually and tonally connected to the earlier films, to not stray too far from what people loved and expected, and George was criticizing us for the very thing we were trying to do.
Looking back with the perspective of several years and a few more Star Wars films, I believe J.J. achieved the near-impossible, creating a perfect bridge between what had been and what was to come.”
Iger also briefly talked about the dip in “Solo” box-office and how he thinks the studio “might’ve put a little bit too much in the marketplace too fast.” A new TV spot for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” film is also out below, along with the news that Lucasfilm and Walt Disney Consumer will announce the products this Thursday that will be a part of this year’s Star Wars Triple Force Friday on October 4th – the name tie-ing to the big three “Star Wars” productions hitting this fall (new film, new series, new game).
