George Lucas felt “betrayed” by Disney’s plans for Star Wars sequels, according to the CEO of the Walt Disney Company.
Bob Iger discusses Disney’s negotiations with Lucas in his new memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.
According to excerpts published by The Hollywood Reporter, Disney acquired Lucas’s outlines for three new Star Wars films after buying LucasFilm, the production company founded by Lucas, in 2012.
That purchase, however, didn’t mean that Disney would necessarily follow Lucas’s proposed plot lines, according to Iger’s account.
When it emerged that they had gone in another direction for the 2015 The Force Awakens (the first instalment in Star Wars’s sequel trilogy), Iger says that Lucas “immediately got upset” when specific plans for the new film were discussed.
“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,” Iger writes.
“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.”
The Disney CEO adds: ”George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”
The Independent has contacted LucasFilm for comment.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy is due to wrap up soon with The Rise of Skywalker, which will be released on 19 December in the UK and 20 December in the US.
