You may not have rushed out to grab Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of The Walt Disney Company, but be advised that it has some pretty sweet gossip inside – including that George Lucas was legally obliged to not rubbish the new Star Wars films.
Iger has been pretty candid about the Star Wars franchise’s fortunes under Disney, admitting that they did too many films too quickly and tried everyone’s patience for Jedi-related content. But he goes even further in the printed word:
I asked George to agree not to publicly criticize any of the Star Wars films we made. When I brought it up with him, he said ‘I’m going to be a big shareholder of the Walt Disney Company. Why would I disparage you or anything you do? Trust me.’ I took him at his word.”
This is important because Lucas didn’t exactly keep to the spirit of the agreement though, subsequently describing Disney as “white slavers” holding his children hostage and describing The Last Jedi as “beautifully made”, which is just about the faintest of faint praise.
Mind you, it also appears that Disney didn’t keep their end of the bargain either: according to Brian Jay Jones’ George Lucas: A Life part of the deal with the Lucasarts purchase was that the sequel trilogy use the treatments Lucas had prepared. Which Disney very pointedly did not, since their films dealt with human and robot characters and not microbiology.
And Iger’s book explicitly says that yes, they bought the treatments but no, they weren’t obliged to use them and had no intention of doing so. So… great?
In any case, it’s good to know that there’s officially not a person alive who thinks that all nine of the Star Wars saga films are satisfying. That’s something?