Star Wars Won the Super Bowl

In news that got lost in the Hurricane Sandy coverage, Disney bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas, including ILM and Skywalker Sound. And with it came news that Disney plans to bring new Star Wars movies to the screen.

I think this will be a good thing - at least for the movies. I loved the original movies (ie episodes IV, V, and VI) but didn't really like the prequels (episodes I, II, and III - Phantom Menace, etc). I think there was so much promise for the prequels but they just didn't deliver. And I think the main problem was George Lucas. He spent the intervening decades between the originals and the prequals as a business man and not as a writer / director.

Even at top form, I am not convinced Lucas was a great director. I have seen on interviews that he wasn't a very good director of actors. He often relied on good actors to coach themselves (Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness, Liam Neeson, Ewen McGregor as compared to Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson - the later of which was just a bad casting decision). In fact, the two best movies, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, were not directed by Lucas.

But I am convinced he was a good writer. Although his dialogue was sometimes pretty flat the stories were engaging and powerful. Remember, he wrote note just Star Wars but the stories for the Indiana Jones movies.

But writing and directing are both crafts that need to be practiced if you want to remain good at them. Believing that you can walk away from them, then come back without any problems is extreme hubris. Lucas decided to write and direct the prequels, and so they suffered. The prequels had not only bad acting but the story didn't hold up.

Disney can be really good at telling stories and I think will be able to create much better movies. At their best, Disney movies like Finding Nemo and Wall-i and Lion King and Monsters, Inc have really great stories.

However, Disney also has a history of creating really bad movies as well. As Seth MacFarlane (the Family Guy) said on Twitter:

Looking forward to seeing what exciting new Star Wars adventures will be cooked up by the dream factory that brought us Mars Needs Moms!

 I think it depends on how seriously Disney treats the movies, and I think they will treat the Star Wars movies well.