No, George Lucas Is NOT Buying Back Star Wars
I have given up on finishing my post on Outlaw Archetypes tonight. Hopefully, the Sons of Ulysses will go live tomorrow.
My current distraction is a rumor that is tearing up the internet that George Lucas is buying back LucasFilm.
Truthfully, the only reason I’m addressing this rumor is because it IS so high on the skyline that my opinion is going to be asked anyway so I may as well get it over with.
The source of this rumor is for once, unambiguous. It’s a YouTube video featuring Doomcock and Kamran Pasha.
Doomcock’s claim to fame is that he had very accurate leaks about The Rise of Skywalker’s “plot.” Clearly, there were unhappy people who were leaking to him at the time. However, his track record hasn’t been that good since then. The problem with Doomcock is that he frequently reports rumors that don’t pass the smell test. Now he is careful to identify them as rumors and to be taken with a grain of salt. However, when it comes to rumors, there is no such thing as rock-hard certainty, there are only degrees of confidence. I have a decent but hardly flawless track record for this myself. That said, Doomcock has too frequently reported showbiz gossip that was clearly fan fiction. Maybe he is an eternal optimist, or maybe he just isn’t very bright but when you report a rumor that is too good to be true, it probably is.
In Doomcock’s defense, I’m pretty sure that he has been targeted by Disney/LucasFilm for deliberate disinformation.
Kamran Pasha appears to be in the same boat. Pasha is a good writer and has worked on some superior shows like NBC’s Kings and Showtime’s Sleeper Cell, both of which I was a fan of. Although, in brutal honesty, Hollywood was more interested in him when hiring a Muslim was a way of giving George W. Bush the finger.
Last year, Pasha publicly made, (what I personally suspect was well-aimed), guesses about Disney’s involvement with FTX. Although, I should state for the legally binding record that Disney’s documentation claims that they had nothing at all to do with FTX. In fact, according to their documents, Disney is just about the only studio in Hollywood that didn’t get hurt by the FTX collapse. Take from that what you will.
It was shortly after this that Kamran Pasha acquired a source at LucasFilm that he publicly designated as “Sparrow.” Pasha claims to have met with him and confirmed his real identity. Sparrow started giving Kamran Pasha some huge inside information leaks. At first, Sparrow’s leaks were accurate. However, that winning streak ended with leaks about Star Wars the Acolyte.
First, there was the prediction that Star Wars Celebration would be a retirement party for Kathleen Kennedy. Basically a several days long retrospectives on how legendary her career in Hollywood has been. It was NOT. There was no indication that she was retiring at all. Celebration was one long circle jerk promoting The Acolyte.
Sparrow had also informed Pasha that the production of the Acolyte was nothing but a “sizzle reel.” I freely admit that The Acolyte’s production has been chaotic, to say the least, but with Bob Iger himself saying the footage he’s seen is “great,” I have to conclude that its production problems are more of a Hollywood clusterfuck than a “sizzle reel” something. The Acolyte is sadly, a genuine production.
Additionally, Pasha made some claims, specifically speaking to a lawyer Robert Allen.
“Noted Patreon blogger Kamran Pasha stated to his subscribers on April 5 that a lawyer from Glaser Weil by the name of Robert Allen had reached out to him that day to ask for his assistance in providing any additional information. This has led to interesting speculations across a number of internet domains… and even to the point of claims that a Lucasfilm insider named “Sparrow” could be used in some way to reveal information about what is going on…“
“Mr. Robert Allen was kind enough to call me while he was working remotely from home on Wednesday, April 12th of 2023. We had a very pleasant conversation. I greatly appreciated him giving me his time and allowing me to get to the bottom of these very incredible claims. Although the sound of dogs barking in the background created some interesting punctuation in the conversation, he corroborated that he had spoken with someone on the day of April 5th but he could not recall if the person was Kamran Pasha. He said he didn’t remember that name. He did not corroborate that he had “reached out” or called anyone on April 5th in the way suggested by reporting from the Patreon account. According to Pasha, the conversation was very noteworthy, so I was surprised he didn’t remember Pasha’s name…“
“Surely Mr. Allen would recall the person giving him info that would constitute ‘the biggest scandal in Hollywood’!“
“I read this quote to Mr. Allen verbatim and asked him to confirm if it was accurate. Mr. Allen stated that he would not have said that and does not remember saying anything that could be construed in such a way.“
This flat contradiction means one of them was lying. Either Kamran Pasha or a lawyer, who works for Disney. Again, take from that what you will.
Doomcock clearly lives in Disney’s head rent-free.
Enough so, that Mickey the Great and Terrible deciding it was worth the minimum investment of resources needed to feed him bad information feels quite plausible since Doomcock is all too happy to repeat it.
Disney LucasFilm knew they had a leak because Pasha was outright trumpeting that there was a leak, and you know for damn sure they would try to figure out which little bird was singing. It usually isn’t too hard to figure out who your most likely suspects are in this situation, you then feed each particular suspect a specific bit of disinformation unique to each separate individual. When the right leak appears in public, you have your man.
At that point, Sparrow would have been invited into an office and told, “Here’s the deal ‘Sparrow’ we know it’s you. So you’ve got a choice. We can either shitcan you publicly and tell everyone in Hollywood why you’ve been fired ensuring that you will never work again, which by the way will be nothing compared to the eternal fucking nightmare of the DISNEY lawsuit we are going to hit you with… Or you can be our bitch. Choose wisely little bird.”
Doomcock and Pasha are getting the same information at the same time. They both seem to regard this as confirmation that their sources are both good.
The problem with that happy state of mind is that it could just as easily mean they are being fed a coordinated diet of purest bullshit.
And frankly, that seems more likely in this case for one simple reason.
There is no way in hell Disney is selling LucasFilm.
It simply doesn’t pass the smell test. Star Wars is so deeply integrated into Disney’s ecosphere of TV, streaming, and theme parks that separating them would be a legal train wreck.
The bigger smell test is the monolithic corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company itself. First, Disney will not part with any IP. This is the company that waited 80 years to recover the rights to freaking Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Recovering this forgotten intellectual property was so important to the company they made big trades to get it. Second, Disney believes with all its heart and soul in the Sunk Costs Fallacy. Disney has invested far too much money into Star Wars to abandon it, sure a sane company would cut its losses and dump it but we are talking about Disney. They have no institutional mechanism for admitting this big of a failure.
On the flip side where the freaking hell is George Lucas supposed to get the money to buy back LucasFilm? He didn’t get paid in cash, he got some cash but mostly stock (which is now locked in a blind trust). He doesn’t have the resources to buy back LucasFilm AND provide it with enough working capital to get it up and running on completely new projects. He would need to get outside financing.
With all of the studios reeling from the Great Streaming Debacle, the only place he could get that kind of scratch is from one of the Big Three of Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street. All three of whom are mega-woke believers in “Stakeholder Capitalism.” They would only back the purchase of LucasFilm if it was going to go to someone who would protect the Woke and it would have to be someone with a track record they already trust.
The brutal part of this equation is it would honestly make more sense for the mythical buyer of LucasFilm to be Kathleen Fucking Kennedy.
Don’t worry, it’s not because Disney ain’t selling Star Wars until the company goes bankrupt.
Okay, I’m done here.
CORRECTION: I goofed. Disney HAS sold off an IP in the past. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Disney acquired it as part of a package deal when they bought the Fox Kids block. Disney piddled around with it for about ten years, finally worked out that they didn’t have a clue what to do with it, and then sold the rights to the original American producer for $43 million. It should be noted that Disney never owned the Japanese original Super Sentai show it was built on. And the fact that you probably didn’t remember that it was once on Jetix tells you how much of a tentpole it was to Disney.
