If you look at the video of George Lucas officially signing over Star Wars to Disney, you can see a defeated look in his eyes – if you interpret it that way, at least. But with $4 billion headed his way, it’s hard to be that sad, lifelong aspirations be damned. And now, nearly 15 years after that sale, Lucas is totally fine with that sale, saying he has moved on to ventures far, far away.
In a piece recently published in The Wall Street Journal, Lucas said he made the correct move in selling off Star Wars to the Mouse House. “Disney took it over and they gave it their vision. That’s what happens. Of course I’ve moved past it. I mean, I’ve got a life. I’m building a museum. A museum is harder than making movies.”
The museum in question is the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is reported to have cost $1 billion, better known as merely a quarter of what he saw in the Disney deal. The museum is set to open next year, adding yet another remarkable piece to Los Angeles’ ever-evolving love of cinema. How much does Lucas want you to visit his namesake museum? It even got him to finally attend SDCC! But don’t expect it to be filled with pieces of junk from his most famous creation. As Lucas put it, “It’s one gallery out of 33. And I did it grudgingly. I didn’t want people to come to the museum and say, ‘Where’s the Star Wars?’”
Lucas not only maintains that establishing and curating an entire museum is far more difficult than making a movie, but he found even the notion of building Star Wars in the streaming world simply impossible. As he previously stated, “We could see the problems, and it was not good. So everybody was looking to save it, but nobody knew streaming would. And that’s when Netflix took off, and at that point, I said, ‘I don’t know what this is gonna be, there’s gonna be a giant transition in the business, I don’t know that much about it,’ and I sold the company, and I retired.”
What do you ultimately make of George Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney? Was it the right move for him?
