Today Disney announced that they had completed a total buy-out of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm Limited. In addition to now owning all of Lucas’s film making ventures like Lucasfilm and special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic, the 4.05 billion dollar buy-out also includes video game publisher Lucasarts, who are currently in the middle of developing the very pretty third person shooter, Star Wars 1313.
The most surprising news to come out of all of this is that Disney is currently prepping a seventh Star Wars film, which will reportedly hit theaters in 2015. George Lucas will serve as a “creative consultant” on the film, rather than the playing the role of director or writer as he has on previous Star Wars. Depending on your opinion of how Lucas has handled the Star Wars franchise over the last one or two decades, this could either be very good or very bad news.
Disney hasn’t announced if the new takeover will effect the development of Star Wars 1313, the on-going Old Republic MMO, or any of other Star Wars related games or properties owned by Lucasarts. Before we start thinking about Star Wars or Monkey Island characters in Kingdom Hearts or anything else similarly crazy, keep in mind that Disney bought Marvel a few years back and we still (thankfully) haven’t seen a Duck Tales / Avengers crossover or anything similar.
But hey, it’s totally fair to start speculating now about how bad that new Star Wars movie is going to be.
