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Mickey Mouse is now the proud owner of his very own Death Star.
In a press release today, the Walt Disney Company announced that it will acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. Up until now, the company has been owned outright by Chairman and founder George Lucas, and now Disney has agreed to buy the company for the price of $4.05 billion dollars. The biggest and most important piece of the Lucasfilm pie is the Star Wars franchise, and George Lucas addressed the issue of handing off such an important series.
For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next. It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime
More about the sale and Star Wars 7 Posted 10.30.12 by Mandy -
George Lucas is bringing his Star Wars saga back to big screen again, starting today with Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace 3D. While the plan is to re-release the entire franchise in 3-D, the Blu-ray versions released last year allowed Lucas to frustrate fans with more alterations, particularly to Return of the Jedi (now Ewoks blink and Darth Vader yells "Nooo!" before tossing the Emperor to his doom) and Phantom Menace, which will see the puppet version of Yoda replaced with a CGI one instead. During a recent interview with THR, Lucas explained why he decided to add a digital Yoda.
We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn’t get it done in time. We couldn’t get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn’t as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.
lucas discusses han vs. greedo >> Posted 02.10.12 by Ryan -
Now that Red Tails has proven to be a moderate success (the $58M project has grossed $22M in its first week), George Lucas can go back to focusing on his real bread and butter — Star Wars (any profit Lucas makes from Red Tails will be just chump change compared to the fortunes Star Wars continues to bring in for him).
Lucas is now doing press for his upcoming 3-D re-release of Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. In a video with Entertainment Weekly, Lucas talks about his experience making Episode IV - A New Hope.
Lucas recalls shooting the first Star Wars as "painful" and "unpleasant."
We never had enough time or money and we were always compromising on everything and it was a difficult experience all the way around.
watch the TV spot for the 3-D re-release of Phantom Menace Posted 01.27.12 by Chris -
Are you a Star Wars but moaning about the fact that George Lucas is re-re-releasing the entire Star Wars sage in theaters starting next month with Episode I - The Phantom Menace? Not interested in paying to see a movie you already own VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray? (But it's in 3-D!!)
Well, there's a new version of Star Wars that odds are you haven't seen and there's no price for admission.
Star Wars: Uncut was made by hundreds of fans, each who made a 15-second cut of the movie.
The Emmy-winning project, yes, Emmy-winning, is the brainchild of 26-year-old Casey Pugh. In 2009, Pugh cut A New Hope into 473, 15-second clips, and asked fans to recreate those clips, creating something that transformed into a patchwork quilt of Lucas' epic sci-fi movie.
You can watch the Director's Cut of Star Wars: Uncut, all 2 hours and 4 minutes of it after the break
watch the movie in its entirety >> Posted 01.23.12 by Chris -
George Lucas, the man fanboys love to hate, is done with the movie business.
Lucas' latest movie, Red Tails, tells an important story about the Tuskegee Airmen's struggle against racism while flying combat aircraft during World War II. Lucas, who spent nearly 20 years getting the movie produced, has already publicly revealed the difficulty in trying to sell it to Hollywood studios, citing that "nobody wanted it" because they didn't "feel there was enough of an audience out there for it." Lucas went ahead and financed the movie himself.
Perhaps the difficulty of making Red Tails, combined with the continued rage that fanboys emit every time Lucas alters one of his Star Wars movies, is the reason he told The New York Times: "I'm retiring. I'm moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff."
more about Red Tails sequels, Indy 5 and fighting fanboys >> Posted 01.18.12 by Ryan -
George Lucas has done it again. With yet another release of Star Wars — this time The Complete Saga (Episodes I-VI) on Blu-ray — Lucas has made more annoying tweaks to his masterpieces, further outraging fans.
His alternations include adding a line in a crucial scene in Return of the Jedi: When the Emperor is electrocuting Luke on the Death Star, Darth Vader now screams "Noooooo!" just before he throws the Emperor down a shaft. Lucas has also altered Obi-Wan Kenobi's introduction in New Hope and made the Ewoks blink in Return of the Jedi.
We, like the rest of the legion of Star Wars fans, have left dent marks on our desks, pleading, "Why, George, why?" Hoping to avoid future concussions, we came up with this list.
10 Things for George Lucas to Do Instead >>
Posted 09.14.11 by reelz -
The next big summer event movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, opens Friday and its success or failure will likely decide the fate of not only the "Star-Spangled Avenger" as a solo movie hero, but also that of its director, Joe Johnston, whose last movie, The Wolfman, was both a critical and box office debacle. Based on the track record of Marvel Studios' previous movies, Cap doesn't have much to worry about and neither does Johnston, who recently said that he has "more stories" about Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) to tell. But, there is another iconic character Johnston "would like to" direct a movie about — the most notorious, and popular, bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe, Boba Fett.
more about Johnston and Boba Fett >> Posted 07.17.11 by BrentJS -
There has been talk of a live-action TV series set in the "galaxy far, far away" of George Lucas's mega-popular Star Wars movie franchise for ages, but the first indication that it might actually happen was when Lucas began hiring writers for a planned 13-episode first season. That was nearly four years ago, so what happened? In a recent interview with CzechPostition (via BleedingCool), producer Rick McCallum revealed that considerable progress was made on the series, but that it is now "on hold" because it is "so ambitious" that it will cost too much money to make it with current technology.
We have 50 hours of third-draft scripts, but the problem we have is there is a lot of digital animation; we don’t have the technology yet to be able to do them at a price that is safe for television. Since we would be financing them, it would be suicide for us to do this… So we are going to wait three or four years.
How will the Star Wars TV series be like The Godfather? >> Posted 06.15.11 by BrentJS -
Today's Challenge: It was on May 25, 1977 that Star Wars was first released in theaters. Can you find a link between Star Wars: Episode 4 - A New Hope and last weekend's biggest movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides?
Our first Facebook movie game, ClusterFlick, plays off that old "six degrees of separation" theory — you know, the one that has a certain Kevin at the center of the Hollywood universe. It's easy to play, but not so easy to win. The goal is to use the major cast of movies to get from Point A to Point B in the smallest number of moves.
Play ClusterFlick >>
Posted 05.25.11 by reelz -
Long time Star Wars fans will probably have some sort of vague recollections of creator George Lucas mentioning the possibility of the Star Wars saga including three sets of trilogies, for nine movies in total. Though Lucas told MTV in 2004 that the series "was never planned as a nine-episode work," the rumor of a sequel has been alive since 1983 when Lucas was quoted in Denise Worrell's book Icons: Intimate Portraits as saying that "the first trilogy is social and political...(the second trilogy) is more about personal growth and self realization, and the third deals with moral and philosophical problems.... The sequel is about Jedi knighthood, justice, confrontation, and passing on what you have learned." Now — prepare yourselves, Star Wars fans — IESB has reported that plans are underway for more Star Wars movies to follow the events in Return of the Jedi.
what's the scoop on the Star Wars sequel? >> Posted 10.24.10 by BrentJS