About a year ago Disney acquired Lucasfilm and stomped on the anthill that is the nerd world, sending us scrambling to figure out where we were in a world where Star Wars sequels could be made with minimal influence from George Lucas, and where one company owned the Disney Princesses, Pixar, the Muppets, Star Wars, and the film rights for the lion’s share of Marvel superhero characters. In comparison the Disney/Marvel acquisition seemed perfectly normal: Warner Bros. has owned DC Comics for years now, after all.
Disney’s chief financial officer told reporters at a conference yesterday that Disney isn’t necessarily done acquiring franchise properties, though they don’t have any in mind at the moment. They’re just, you know, leaving room in case they want dessert.
If you’ll forgive me for continuing the metaphor, Disney did have a bit of a snack this weekend when it worked out a deal with Paramount Pictures, who still hold the distribution rights for the Indiana Jones franchise. The end result of that was that Disney can now, if it so chooses, continue the franchise, reboot it, craft prequels, or whatever. And if the company does acquire more of the franchises you grew up loving, according to Jay Rasulo, the deals will be more of that size. From The Wrap:
“It’s safe to say you’ll continue to see us doing acquisitions in the future,” Rasulo told the Wall Street heavy crowd, advising them to not read too much into the buyback plans. He did say, however, that any deals would probably be smaller in size, noting that the company did not have “anything on the scale of LucasFilm or Marvel” in its sights.
As for how Indy and Star Wars will be integrated in with the rest of Disney’s holdings, Rasulo said we can look to Marvel for an example. So, I guess we’re getting an Indiana Jones team up movie? That’s a bit of a vague answer, but Disney is gearing itself up to have a Star Wars movie out every year, with a new trilogy supported by one-off movies. That’s not too dissimilar to Marvel, if you consider the Avengers films to be the trilogy and Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man to be the one-offs. It’ll be interesting to see how Indiana Jones, a much less robust (though no less compelling) setting for expanded universe stories, fits into this model.
(via The Wrap.)
