Discussion Lucasfilm "dramatic downsizing"

I pray they don't turn the SW animated projects into the loud dumb **** that is the Marvel Cartoons now.....Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes was a great action cartoon that had depth that older viewers could get into as well as the kids. AEMH's season long arc's went bye bye when Disney and that dirtbag Jeph Loeb wanted to dumb it down in the name of kids.

If they take that same approach with Star Wars,then that would really suck something awful. Im not sure all the TWC fans realized how good they had it.....because compared to the moronic junk that is the Marvel Cartoons...TCW stories looked like something out of War and Peace

What is worse is that, that show had great ratings...but Disney was like...."Bleep It..We don't give a *****.....we can sell more toys to the kiddies our way"

 

It is time to move on from the era of the PT (which is what Clone Wars is), and I think this was a good move; they want to direct attention for SW to the new stories. I am a fan of ALL of the old movies, but let's move on. They have rereleased the SW movies enough times at this point.

Yes, Disney is in control ultimately, but they have shown that they know when to let the makers make the films. The Big 3 are back, great people are putting their minds together to make the new movie a fantastic experience. You never know what kind of awesome announcement will come next regarding the new series of movies (Gary Oldman as the evil Sith Lord?). There is a lot of room for optimism.

 

No matter what choices are made, someone somewhere will somehow be unhappy, pissed, annoyed, betrayed, angry, angsty, bitchy or whatever.

Why not relax and just wait and see what happens? We have more SW stuff heading our way than we dared to hope for just a few months ago. Yet people are unhappy yet again.
If you don't like the new stuff, no one is forcing you to consume it. If you like it, even better.

In the end, it all comes down to one very cold, hard reality - you can't do anything about it.
Wait and see what happens. If you like it, go enjoy it. If not, you've got a ton of material you can enjoy. There will also be a ton of other new material coming in the next few decades.
So.
I don't see why all the panic when we don't really have any concrete information to panic about.

 

Fear not, people. In mergers and acquisitions, businesses strive to increase efficiency, eliminate redundancy and acquire strong properties that do not compete against existing properties in order to increase profits. That is why Disney acquired LFL. LFL had a property they wanted (Star Wars films and related interests), some of the best technical units in the industry (ILM, etc.) which will be largely left alone, because they are better than anything Disney had in house (hence the desire to acquire them); the things Disney already does better (and has a larger, more lucrative market share of), they will naturally downsize or terminate at LFL. It is not shocking the\at animation is one area where DISNEY of all companies feels that their in house animation unit is superior. As for cancelling a number of existing Star Wars properties, this too is simple logic; they want fans excited about the future of the franchise, which is a return to what was really successful: feature length movies. Once these films and their characters and plot points are established, there will be all kinds of tie-in material, rest assured. Let's not forget, no matter whether one likes EU material or not, that, since RotS, it has existed to tap a relatively small group of die hards; the next projects will appeal to all who are excited about the films that are soon to be in production. This is all just good business practice. Had Lucas kept LFL or bought Disney instead and decided to return to making Star Wars films, his actions would have been the same. This is just how business works.

 

Actually yes, I'm fully aware of the issues at Lucas Arts. However, given Disney's track record with acquiring and disbanding game studios, and given that Lucas Arts had a completed game which was a step in the right direction (Star Wars:First Assault), it's ashame the company was not given the opportunity to see if it could florish again. Disney has very little interest in platform/PC games anymore, most of their efforts are directed at web based games which direct traffic to their websites.

Yancy

 

Slimming Lucasfilm down isn't the same as shuttering it.

 

Do you mean 1313, or some other title I wasn't aware of?

1313 looked like a relatively uninspired cover shooter that just happened to be in the Star Wars universe. Uncharted on Coruscant.

 

That and also we got a few screens and a preview video and nothing new for ages.
That game seemed to be dead way before Disney was introduced into the equation.

 

First Assault was a leaked video that came out last week... it was battlefront III (minus clone wars time period) for all intensive purposes. Lucasarts pulled the videos very quickly. Rumors had it it was a test of an xbox arcade game that if it did well would bring about a full Battlefront III. First Assault looked very promising imho.

1313 is/was a very different game which I wasnt too excited about.

 

All Disney is doing, as I've repeatedly said and will continue to say until I'm blue in the face, is cleaning up the mess George Lucas left behind. Under his tenure, the company became a bloated and inefficient creature producing everything except the one thing spelled out in the name Lucasfilm, the very thing Lucas got into the filmmaking business for in the first place, i.e. FILMS. For the last eight years they've produced absolutely nothing of consequence in the grander scheme of things (with one very noteworthy exception); instead they produced video games that only fans play, comics and books that only fans read, and promised television projects that either never come to fruition or were too foolish of an idea to actually be considered in the first place; and the only actual movies they released were the same movies they released before, just with a 3D added element that simply wasn't sufficient to get a cash-strapped, disaffected, jaded, sick-of-3D, sick-of-the-same-old-thing-all-over-again general audience to come see them. And as much as it may pain some of us to admit it, we need the general audience on LFL's side to have any hope of success. I don't care how many of us there are; there aren't enough of us fans to keep a big-ass company afloat on our own. We can't do it. And we certainly can't do it when the company itself has for years been causing its one tentpole franchise serious long-term damage, the effects of which we are all seeing come to fruition right now.

So let's go straight to the aforementioned noteworthy exception. TCW was fantastic. It didn't damage the franchise at all; if anything, it expanded the scope of it dramatically and was the sole thing breathing any fresh life into the Saga in terms of actual storytelling that can be watched by a general audience. But as much as I absolutely loved TCW, it's done. Over. Finis. Not one single solitary word that I or anyone else can say here is going to change that. The show is OVER. But the fact is, that was the only thing among the much-lamented list of things now being cut off that I actually WOULD miss. Why? Because it TOLD STORIES, stories had something to do with the actual story of the Saga. It made me care about the characters when I has long since STOPPED caring about them. The loss of that show is indeed a loss to the Saga in particular and to television in general; but it's GONE. No one should be surprised that the animation department is being downsized now that that decision has been made. It was inevitable. Anyone who is shocked had a completely unrealistic and distorted picture of what was going on to begin with, and I can only guess that they honestly believed there was still a hope the show was going to return; but when the staff is dismissed, that means it's REAL now. News flash: it was real from the moment it was announced. If people continue to hope beyond hope, they're only disappointing themselves. And if they think it's Disney's fault, they're also fooling themselves; it was the fault of LFL for getting overconfident and somehow expecting an eight-season run when the original deal with Cartoon Network was for five seasons. LFL should have stuck to the original five-season deal and condensed TCW into a more forward-moving series with way more mythology episodes that moved the plot along, and stopped front-loading each season with eccentric episodes that didn't move the plot forward; and if they had done so, we wouldn't now be lamenting the fact that we'll never see a proper ending to the series.

And let's be honest here: Detours WASN'T a good idea - EVER; it was designed as a parody, and it's fine for us as fans to parody the franchise, but when the administration at LFL - which ultimately means Lucas himself, since he supoported the idea publicly - decided that it was a good idea that the franchise itself should parody itself, that was a sign - in bright lights and bold colors, mind you - that LFL had run out of steam and ideas. You only stoop to parodying your own franchise if you've run out of ideas about what to say IN the franchise. The fault lay not with Seth Green and his staff for wanting to do the show, because they just wanted to have some fun and make people laugh; the fault lay with LFL for not understanding that, for all Green's good intentions, his idea could only deal the franchise even further long-term damage. The very idea was in fact a detour from what LFL needed to be doing, and in that sense it was aptly named.

And let's not forget all the on-again, off-again, on-again-again, off-again-again nonsense that LFL was doing, teasing us with the live-action series that in all likelihood was not only not going to happen under the existing administration, but never could happen at all, given the budget required to do it properly, a budget that LFL could never have bankrolled. How much damage does it do to a franchise when LFL keeps promising things and never does them? And this is a company that has promised and failed to deliver, on so many levels, for YEARS. It got so bad that I had become quite sure that it now SPECIALIZED in disappointing people. Say whatever you want about Disney; at least it's not making promises it has no intentions of keeping.

And 1313? I'm forty-one years old; I don't play video games; I certainly don't consider them major parts of the franchise. Yes, you can have a fun, immersive playing experience, but because they're games, in which the player is the major determining factor in what happens during the game, they tell no story in and of themselves. They have nothing to say; the player determines what they say. And that's not storytelling. A story is something composed by authors and told to listeners in full from start to finish; the listener has no say in the direction of the story, and shouldn't be entitled to have that kind of a say, or else it's just Mad Libs with great graphics. All the Star Wars video games put together still would never be as important to the franchise as a single FILM with a STORY.

Frankly, what Disney is doing is what SHOULD have been done some time ago, and if LFL had done it then, there would have been no need to sell to Disney in the first place. They should have scrapped Detours and 1313 at least a year ago, if not earlier; they were wastes of the general audience's time to begin with. They should have either pooped or gotten off the pot with the live-action series, rather than hang around in Maybe-land for years at a time. They should have made TCW a leaner and meaner series that did more impactful storytelling each season, instead of burning away half a season, every season, on non-important arcs that were at least one or more episodes longer than they had to be. They should have turned serious attention to the ST some time ago, rather than regularly refusing to and, worse still, blaming anyone in the audience who criticized the prequels for their not doing so (because it's always helpful to your franchise to show contempt for your audience), until at last having to be forced to do so because of the business necessities of making LFL more attractive to Disney. They should have significantly reduced the amount of EU material that was released each year, made it far more relevant to the Saga than it was, and subjected it to far better quality control, rather than release series after series of novels in which the characters are written inconsistently and behave stupidly, in which there were entire novels (placed in the middle of what they called "epic storylines," surprisingly) where nothing truly happens to move the story along, and in which the general audience has no interest because they don't really relate back to the films in any way they can understand (in short, more Darth Plagueis, less Fate of the Jedi).

Not a pretty picture, is it? And yet this is the company that Disney found itself having to deal with upon buying it: they quickly saw (if they didn't already know) that LFL, much like its founder, had become a bloated caricature of its former self, living largely on past glories, constantly claiming it WANTS to make new and exciting films and yet also constantly waffling and tapdancing around when asked about whether it's actually MAKING any. What was Disney supposed to do? They couldn't get anything done with the LFL that was there; the only kind of LFL that would be capable of making films that a general audience would respect again is a leaner, meaner company specifically devoted to the task of making films (you know, like a film company with the word "film" in its name is supposed to do?). No bureaucratic and unproductive nightmare like LFL had become was going to do what it had to do to survive, to say nothing of thrive. And it was doing neither; Steve Sansweet himself voiced concern in those days over whether or not LFL even had a future before the Disney purchase. The person who left it in such sorry shape that Sansweet felt that was not Bob Iger; it was George Lucas. I don't care what some of these big-company-hating Occupy Wall Street rejects are claiming: they don't have the right or the cause to blame the Walt Disney Corporation for anything that's happened; on the contrary, they should probably thank Disney for saving Lucasfilm from itself, from its own arrested and stagnant mindset, and from its namesake who promoted that sense of stagnation by his own lack of interest in what had once been his primary purpose: MAKING FILMS. All of these video games, these parody shows, these low-quality books, these bad ideas everyone thinks is so much more important than the films from which they sprung, all had to die. They DESERVED to die; and frankly, if we still want LFL to exist at all in ten or twenty years, they NEEDED to die.

 

No would she be surprised at all by restructuring and changes when a large corporation takes over a smaller one. It's the reality of business. If the cost of new episodes of "The Clone Wars" is very high and the net return on that investment is low, it's going to get axed. Deal with it. We're getting a new movie directed by JJ Abrams. I want that more than seeing Ahsoka and Rex.

 

Because ending a show with a steady following with 2-3 seasons worth of material under development, leaving multiple character and story arcs unfinished at almost the point where the whole larger show arc was approaching the "climax" is SUUUCH a good business move... :rollyeyes:

Filoni and team were not a threat to the ST films. They were doing their thing in their own division. Why not leave them alone to do it?

This situation is starting to remind me of what happened to the Trek office at Paramount after Les "I hate Sci Fi" Moonives canned Enterprise. They locked the doors, fired all the people, sold all the props and basically ruined an almost 30 year strong information archive an pool of experienced and knowledgeable people who knew how to make good Trek, and make it on a budget.

When Trek next appeared, they had to start from scratch with a producer and production team that knew little about how to make a proper Trek film, and it showed in the likeable, but not very "Trek" re-imagining/re-boot.l

 

I couldn't agree with you more

 

Pfluegermeister I'm 95% in agreement with you... just want to state I know 40 year old who read the comics and play the games. Plus some of them told amazing storiesjust look at KotOR I and II (player choosen dialog but with cannon endings), Dark Forces/Jedi Knight, or Republic Commando in the video game departmentt for great story telling games. For the books, you and me are in agreement, after NJO the books in that time period failed as much if not more than they succeeded and needed way better quality control (NJO Started out rough too), the post RotJ books that werent part of a multiauthor saga needed quality control too just that some of them where good dispite the lack of it. I enjoyed Darth Plagueis a lot more than FotJ minus maybe the Lost Tribe of the Sith plot angle having squandered potential.

Again, not disagreeing... just stating that dispite what George Lucas did to LFL there was a few things that werent movies that kept saving them from imploding.

 

I'M HAPPY!!!

 

Let's not ignore its blatant canon and character destroying ways.

 

In my reading of all this, these decisions are good ideas from a business standpoint. As any Star TREK fan can attest, there is such a thing as "franchise fatigue": If you have too much product out there, eventually all except the extreme hard core of fans will tire of it. In the case of Trek, hell, even the hardcore fans were tired of it in the early years of this century. Now however, Paramount concentrates on one thing: Releasing a new Star Trek film once every three or four years and making it an event picture. Anticipation for the new film is high both in fan circles and in the general moviegoing population.

TCW and Detours and 3D re-releases of the films were all decisions made under the Lucas regime, intended to expand SW's longevity in ways other than continuing the theatrical saga. All of this, I propose, is good - under the assumption that there will never be a new film again (which most of us believed up until October of last year). Once the prospect of new movies, inarguably the core of the SW brand and the main reason we all love the franchise, arises again, as it has, the wisdom of saturating the market with not one, but several animated shows, and "special" editions of the old films in re-release, must be called into question for the reason mentioned above. The next film is now less than three years away, and SW will hardly "go dark" until then. There is CW material still to be released (and I would argue that releasing the two or three or however many story arcs they still have left in a DVD-only format or some such thing is more of an event to look forward to than yet another season).

Ultimately, what they want is obviously to build anticipation and buzz around the new film. And the last thing that anybody could want is if the general audience greeted Episode VII with merely a yawn because they will have been so inundated with SW for nearly a decade at that point. No, any SW fan can tide himself over will all sorts of things until Ep VII arrives: video games, Clone Wars DVDs and reruns, new novels and comic books. Then, when the film arrives, it'll be an event and the entire EU (i.e. all that we have right now) will spin off in so many new directions that SW will feel a lot fresher than it has felt for the past few years.

 

And I (and a lot of others) want the opposite, or (best of all worlds) both. Both is probably asking too much. So I'll take the former, thank you very much. The Han/Luke/Leia story has had it's extensive day between the films and the EU material. I want new stories about less exposed characters that have the opportunity for new directions to take.

 

According to who, exactly? Anything that was retconned was done so under Lucas' supervision, and HIS decisions always override lesser canon.

 

“That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "**** you" right under your nose.”

J. D. Salinger

and I agree, lets wait to see what happens before we rashly judge and jump to conclusions

 

I've said it in some other threads...postponing/scrapping Detours was a very smart move by Disney, it shows me they are serious about releasing quality SW material and not junk. They are trimming they fat and cleaning house at LFL and that is actually a positive thing. I feel for people that will be let go, but in the end I want quality material being released.

As for the Clone Wars...I'm sure there are many fans of the show that will agree with me, the quality of this season was not great at times, there were some weak story arcs. So why drag it on any longer? Is it better to end a show earlier on while the quality is still high (eg: Breaking Bad) or let it drag on and on, flogging a dead horse until it loses all it's relevancy and is tarnised (eg: The X-Files)?

 

Do you have a source for that or are you going by Filoni's constant attempts at criticizing and bashing Lucas? As far as I'm concerned, both could be equally blamed. As an example from the show's past, let's not forget Filoni's idea to turn Durge into a Human.

 

The only current SW bitching I have was the crappy and disappointing cartel content pack I bought last night while playing The Old Republic, but I blame that on Bioware.

 

Marvel got a bad dose of that after it was bought by Disney and Perlmutter decided he wanted a seat on the Big Board on top of running the division.