Star Wars creator George Lucas shared his support for The Walt Disney Company’s current board amid a proxy battle against Nelson Peltz.
George Lucas. Photo Credit: Joi Ito from Inbamura, Japan, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
As reported by Deadline, Lucas’ statement reads, “Creating magic is not for amateurs. When I sold Lucasfilm just over a decade ago. I was delighted to become a Disney shareholder because of my long-time admiration for its iconic brand and Bob Iger’s leadership.
He continued, “When Bob recently returned to the company during a difficult time, I was relieved. No one knows Disney better. I remain a significant shareholder because I have full faith and confidence in the power of Disney and Bob’s track record of driving long-term value. I have voted all of my shares for Disney’s 12 directors and urge other shareholders to do the same.”
George Lucas, Lucas Films award winning director/filmmaker receives an award from the Tuskegee Airman Inc. committee during the 2012 Tuskegee National Convention, Las Vegas, NV., Aug. 3, 2012. Lucas was recognized for his contributions and recent film, Red Tails, which was the first major movie created about the Tuskegee Airmen. TAI is a non-profit organization dedicated to honoring the accomplishments of the Army Air Corps African-American air, ground and operations crew members during World War II. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Colville McFee)
Lucas’ comments come in the wake of him describing The Walt Disney Company and its leadership that included Bob Iger as “white slavers” ahead of the release of The Force Awakens back in 2015.
During an interview with Charlie Rose, Lucas said, “These are my kids. … All the Star Wars films. … I loved them. I created them. I’m very intimately involved in them. … I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and…”
Not only did Lucas describe Disney as “white slavers,” but Bob Iger admitted in his book The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of The Walt Disney Company that Lucas felt betrayed by how he and Disney went about creating their sequel trilogy.
Iger wrote, “At some point in the process, George told me that he had completed outlines for three new movies. He agreed to send us three copies of the outlines: one for me; one for Alan Braverman; and one for Alan Horn, who’d just been hired to run our studio. Alan Horn and I read George’s outlines and decided we needed to buy them, though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines he’d laid out.”
Iger added, “He knew that I was going to stand firm on the question of creative control, but it wasn’t an easy thing for him to accept. And so he reluctantly agreed to be available to consult with us at our request. I promised that we would be open to his ideas (this was not a hard promise to make; of course we would be open to George Lucas’s ideas), but like the outlines, we would be under no obligation.”
Bob Iger | 2019 Disney Legends Awards Ceremony | D23 EXPO 2019. Photo Credit: nagi usano from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
READ: What’s Black And White And Red All Over? Nelson Peltz’s Trian “White Paper”
Next, Iger shared, “Early on, Kathy brought J.J. and Michael Arndt up to Northern California to meet with George at his ranch and talk about their ideas for the film. George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations.”
He went on to admit they had no intention of ever using Lucas’ outlines, “The truth was, Kathy, J.J., Alan, and I had discussed the direction in which the saga should go, and we all agreed that it wasn’t what George had outlined. 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,” Iger wrote. “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.”
He then shared that Lucas felt betrayed, “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.”
Bob Iger via New York Times Events YouTube
Financial analyst Valliant Renegade reacted to Lucas’ support of the current Disney board saying, “Anybody in George’s position has a team of advisors around him at all times for stuff like this especially when it comes to legal and financial issues. And when it comes to voting Disney shares, of course, George’s holdings would be one of those you would expect to always cast a ballot unlike a lot of the regular mom & pops that might have five, ten, or even a hundred shares of The Walt Disney Company held individually.”
He continued, “And with Bob Iger making strong pressure plays across the gamut to try to bolster support in this proxy fight against Peltz who must have more behind him than we know considering how far out of his way Bob Iger is going to get this done, well, maybe a lot of pressure was put on Lucas to make such a statement, or maybe his advisors told him, ‘Nope, this is the best thing to do. To not rock the boat. Let Bob keep going because Nelson Peltz is going to destroy your Disney share value and you might lose hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth.’ We don’t know. We’re just speculating right now. All of those things are in the cards and on the table.”
He also shared his own opinion that the statement from Lucas reads like a Disney press release, “Boy, there’s a lot of folks out there that might be forgiven that that sounds like something straight out of a multitude of recent Disney press releases.”
What do you make of Lucas’ statement in support of The Walt Disney Company’s board?
