Why Disney Buying Star Wars is Awesome

So you may or may not have heard today that Disney purchased Lucasfilm, and all of its various subcompanies and intellectual properties, from George Lucas for the paltry (at least to Disney) sum of 4.05 Billion Dollars. And by “intellectual properties,” I mean Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. What’s most important about this news is that Disney has also announced plans to release Star Wars Episode VII in 2015.

Now this will undoubtedly polarize the Star Wars community more than any other bit of Star Wars related news since Jar-Jar reared his ugly and more-than-a-little-racist face in our beloved series. People are going to be scared Disney will stray from the canon, which they might. People are going to be afraid that Disney won’t take this series seriously, which I doubt. I am here to tell you that this is the best thing to happen to Star Wars since Return of the Jedi’s release.

May I present to you Exhibit A:

Marvel

See a long time ago Marvel was a much smaller studio. It made lower (not small, just…lower) budget super hero movies like Blade, Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four, Hulk, and Man-Thing. You know, bad movies. And while they did occasionally have gems (namely Spiderman 2 and X-2), both those trilogies ended in god-awful conclusions. Then, in 2008, Disney bought Marvel. Since then we’ve had what’s referred to as “Marvel Phase 1,” that is those films leading up to The Avengers. In that sequence not a single one of those movies was certified rotten on Rotten Tomatoes (which isn’t my favorite critic site, but it is good for a summary of reviews). Compare that to before the buyout, where the vast majority of their films were rotten (the only exception in my list above, excluding Spiderman and X-Men of course is Hulk, which still scores lower than all Phase 1 films). Disney worked wonders with Marvel and turned them into a legitimate studio. Imagine what they could do with a studio that has a rich past and only recently fell out of glory.

And now Exhibit B:

George Lucas

Stop laughing. Seriously. Look, now George may have screwed up Star Wars recently, letting Greeto shoot first, creating Jar-Jar, casting Hayden Christensen as Anakin, killing Padme with a broken heart. I’ll stop there and save us the pain. But let’s not forget that George did create Star Wars.

But why he’ll be another reason why Star Wars will be good is that he’ll be a creative consultant. That means he’ll influence the world, but he won’t write or direct the films. We’ll have true Star Wars, but as seen through the lens of someone with actual talen- I mean someone who has a fresh perspective. So unless they hire Michael Bay (which would induce mass suicide I think and would probably cause Joss Whedon to sabotage The Avengers like J.D. sabotages his relationships [sorry I’ve been watching a lot of scrubs lately]), we won’t have scenes like this:

Or characters like this:

Either of them

In conclusion, this is good. Don’t freak out. Rejoice, cause we have more Star Wars coming.