Star Wars creator George Lucas blasted The Walt Disney Company for not understanding the franchise and story as well as the Force.
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)
During an appearance at the Cannes film festival last week, The Hollywood Reporter detailed that Lucas informed a crowd, “I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was … who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The Force, for example, nobody understood the Force.”
He added, “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) in Lucasfilm’s OBI-WAN KENOBI, exclusively on Disney+. ©.
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Lucas is famous for criticizing Disney for its treatment of Star Wars after he sold his company to them back in 2012. Ahead of the release of The Force Awakens in 2015, Lucas described Disney as “white slavers” in an interview with Charlie Rose.
He 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…”
Disney CEO Bob Iger also noted that Lucas felt betrayed by Disney in his book The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of The Walt Disney Company.
After detailing how Lucas had written a number of outlines for a sequel trilogy, how he made sure to purchase them, and then chose to go in a completely direction with the sequel trilogy, Iger said, “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.”
Daisy Ridley as Rey and Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens (2015), Lucasfilm
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During an appearance at The East Harlem School at Exodus House in October 2020, Lucas answered a question from 7th grader Jeremiah, “The world has changed so much since the first Star Wars movie, how do you think the changes in the fight for racial justice will impact the Star Wars universe going forward?”
The creator of Star Wars answered, “I don’t know, I mean. I kind of lost control of Star Wars, so it’s going off in a different path than what I intended.”
He added, “But the first six [Star Wars films] are very much mine and my philosophy. And I think that philosophy sort of, goes beyond any particular time, because it’s based on history, it’s based on philosophy, it’s based on a lot of things.”
It’s highly likely that Lucas’ conception of Star Wars and the Force will continue to be maligned by Disney in its upcoming The Acolyte series. Actress Amandla Stenberg told Empire that the show is set in “a time in the galaxy where the way people use the Force is… in canon, it’s very expansive. It doesn’t necessarily have the more rigid conceptions that it might have later in the Galactic Republic.”
She added, “So that provides us the opportunity to maybe explore the different way this character relates to the Force.”
Mae (Amandla Stenberg) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
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Of note, Lucas’ comments also appear to contradict Lucasfilm’s marketing push that Dave Filoni is the heir to George Lucas or that he was George’s apprentice.
Lucasfilm attempted to spin this narrative back in September while promoting the Ahsoka series. The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau recalled in the featurette a set visit from Lucas, “George visited the set when we were filming the lightsaber fight in the Japanese garden in Season 2.”
“And I think he was really encouraging of Dave stepping up to this role. And so George would turn to Kathy and myself, and be proud of Dave,” he said. “He was Dave’s teacher and Dave was his apprentice.”
Jon Favreau, George Lucas, Rosario Dawson, and Dave Filoni in Master & Apprentice: A Special Look at Ahsoka (2023), Lucasfilm
Lucas had also previously claimed he had no apprentice while discussing The Revenge of the Sith with CNN back in the early 2000s. When asked if he wanted Star Wars to continue after he passed away, Lucas said, “No. No. I’ve worked it out to where when I do it in terms of the films that I’m doing. This will be the last. The next film, three, will be the last film and it’ll be a six part series and that’ll be the end of it.”
When asked if he was mentoring anyone, he replied, “No. No. There may be other venues for it, but not in the theatrical release, but for sort of offshoot stories and things in other areas, but not in theatrical films. I just want to keep that special. I don’t want to have it sort of turn into Star Trek.”
What do you make of Lucas’ recent comments regarding Star Wars and how Disney has treated it?
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