The lobby of Lucasfilm Ltd’s headquarters at San Francisco’s Presidio is tastefully decorated with Craftsman-style lamps and leather chairs. There’s a statue of special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien posing with King Kong in the back, and a full-sized R2-D2 up front. Mickey Mouse is nowhere to be found.
In the five years since Walt Disney Co. purchased Lucasfilm from founder George Lucas for $4.1 billion, the world’s largest entertainment company has followed a familiar script. As with earlier acquisitions of digital pioneer Pixar and cable sports giant ESPN, Lucasfilm has been allowed to retain its iconoclastic character while benefiting from the new owner’s largesse.
After some fallow years near the end of Lucas’s reign, Lucasfilm is now buried under a blizzard of projects. These include two Star Wars Lands under construction at theme parks in California and Florida; a Star Wars TV show for Disney’s new subscription television service launching in 2019, and, of course, the movies, including “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”, which will open December 15. Those films, which have reinvigorated the franchise and brought in billions of dollars, succeeded under the watch of Lucasfilm’s boss, Kathleen Kennedy.
The ship won’t drop out of light speed any time soon. Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that the company was making a fourth trilogy of the Star Wars saga. Add those three to the four films already in the works, and fans can count on seeing big screen intergalactic warfare well into the next decade.
Vicki Dobbs Beck, head of a new Lucasfilm division that’s tapping virtual reality to tell Star Wars stories, has been with the studio for 25 of the past 29 years. She said that, with all the projects currently underway, this has been “the pinnacle of my time with Lucasfilm”.
Lucas laid the groundwork for this renaissance. In 2012, he recruited Kennedy, a producer, to help him run the company and start a new generation of Star Wars films. Four months later, he announced the sale to Disney.
Kennedy was no stranger. A longtime lieutenant to director Steven Spielberg, she worked with the special effects wizards at Lucasfilm on many of Spielberg’s films.
Lucas and Kennedy are similar in many ways. Like him, she’s usually no fan of the spotlight. Despite working on some of the most famous movies ever made, Kennedy has tried to keep a low profile.
“There’s nothing I like more than to have one of our movies run, and then I go the ladies’ room and listen to everyone talk about it,” she told “Vanity Fair” last year.
At the company, her purview involves much more than Star Wars. The Lucasfilm empire includes Industrial Light & Magic, a pioneer in movie special effects, and Skywalker Sound, which produces sound effects and handles editing for as many as 100 films a year. Many Lucasfilm traditions have continued under Kennedy, such as a speaker series featuring visiting movie makers and other entertainment talents who give hourlong presentations to employees. R
Now in her fifth year as head of the studio, Kennedy has begun to emerge from the shadows. At an October event sponsored by “Elle” magazine, she called on studios, unions and talent agencies to convene a commission to develop protections against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. “We must make the film industry an exemplar in this regard, a model for self-regulation that other businesses can emulate,” she said.
The transition to Disney control wasn’t without casualties, though. One division that was axed was LucasArts, a maker of video games. It was scrapped in favour of a licensing strategy in which Disney charges game makers who want to use characters in Lucasfilm properties. Some mobile game development is still done in-house, however.
Disney has put its mark on the business in other ways. Industrial Light & Magic has expanded its offices in Singapore and Vancouver and opened one in London, responding to industry globalisation and the increasing availability of production tax credits. For her part, Kennedy sought to reorganise a top-down structure when it came to the creative side.
She formed an 11-member Lucasfilm story group to develop projects consistent with the Star Wars character library and mythology. Before her arrival, the creative process existed inside the head of exactly one person.
“It was George,” said Diana Williams, a member of the group. “George was story.”
The first film of the series, “Star Wars”, was released 40 years ago. With 16 years between the first and second trilogies, and an additional decade between the second and third trilogies, fans found a lot of room to build their own worlds. Kennedy, as part of her creative initiative, was having none of it.
She declared the characters and stories from non-film Star Wars projects, such as novels and comic books by independent authors, as non-canon. That rankled some longtime fans and former business partners.
“I don’t quite see the point of repudiating the Expanded Universe,” said Lou Aronica, a former executive at Bantam Books, which published Star Wars novels. “Those stories kept fans committed to Star Wars during the long hiatus between films.”
Ironically, if Disney were to acquire 21st Century Fox Inc, a potential deal currently under discussion, it would unite Lucasfilm with the studio that released the first six Star Wars films, giving Disney complete control of Lucas’s legacy.
In her five years running Lucasfilm, Kennedy has sought to tap consumer markets previously ignored by the company. She created ILMxLab, a unit devoted to virtual reality. Its work is evident in a new business venture with Void, an entertainment company.
At three malls in Anaheim, California, Orlando and London, Void is opening 30-minute virtual reality experiences. For $30, guests put on goggles and computer backpacks and walk through a virtual Star Wars story, blasting stormtroopers, feeling the heat on the molten planet of Mustafar and even smelling the giant lava monsters.
It could be the start of something big, according to Cliff Plumer, Void’s chief executive. “Shopping malls, theatre chains, airports, cruise ships, they’re all looking for attractions,” he said.
Lucasfilm’s licensing business has also sought to broaden the base of customers for Star Wars products — taking a brand traditionally known for boys and widening it to include apparel, jewellery and high-end electronics aimed at girls and adults.
“One of our top priorities within our segment is what we call audience expansion,” Jimmy Pitaro, the executive who runs Disney’s consumer products business, said.
Toys, malls and jewellery aside, Kennedy’s eye has remained fixed on the core business, where she’s had the most impact. The two Star Wars films released so far by Disney have grossed more than $3 billion. Along the way, Kennedy has made personnel decisions that triggered mild online panic, with fans worrying the films would suffer.
For the first Disney instalment, “The Force Awakens”, in 2015, writer Michael Arndt was hired and then eased out. More recently, no fewer than three directors were let go before Ron Howard stepped in to helm a planned stand-alone film telling the origin story of Star Wars character Han Solo. It’s scheduled for release on May 25.
“The Last Jedi,” with its return of the central character from Star Wars lore, Luke Skywalker, looks to continue Lucasfilm’s winning streak, with projections approaching $200 million in its domestic opening weekend alone. The first trailer, released in October, went crazy on YouTube.
With what appears to be a passing of the torch to new heroine Rey from now-elder Jedi Knight Skywalker, as played by Mark Hamill, and the obligatory new, cute creatures called Porgs, the film seems to have something for Star Wars fans of all ages and species.
Kennedy’s presence, as both an experienced moviemaker and Lucas’s hand-picked successor, has given the company and its employees a sense of continuity, said Brian Jay Jones, author of “George Lucas: A Life”. But even with five years in, the man who built the legendary tale and the company behind it looms large.
“George gave them a gigantic universe to play with,” Jones said.
