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Caroline Reid's Forbes Piece on Star Wars Continues to Impact
🕑 Added 2024-04-25 13:49:06 +0000 UTCWhen Valliant Renegade released his findings using tax filings from the UK and discovered Star Wars was deeply in the hole... the mainstream media took a pass. When we continued to present the information on the Pro channel and on ThatParkPlace.com, still the legacy outlets didn't want to touch it. But one writer did: Caroline Reid.
Over at Forbes, she began researching what we were talking about and she came to the same conclusion. Star Wars was a financial loser for Disney. Worse, it wasn't because they made a bad deal with George Lucas; it was because they had strangled the golden goose.
That information is continuing to damage Disney, though we wish it had been allowed publication prior to the proxy battle and vote. Take a look at these paragraphs from MovieWeb, where folks who would normally have carried Disney's water are beginning to sound an awful lot like us over the last two years:
"Four billion is nothing to sneeze at. On paper, George Lucas' sale of the Star Wars intellectual property in its entirety to Disney could have been mistaken for a desperate act. In retrospect, he was probably just fed up trying to make fans happy. Swooping in, Disney assumed they got it on the cheap back in 2012. We don't have nearly the time to cover every wild twist and turn that has afflicted the Star Wars franchise or Disney since, but Lucas' action looks savvier by the year....
One problem. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore, and Disney hasn't found a way to make it profitable. Critical reception is mixed; the community is split, one Jedi-themed attraction is already closed, and, most alarmingly, the toys aren't selling. Don't worry; we'll explain that market indicator in a second. It turns out that Star Wars isn't the money fountain we all thought, and Disney CEO Bob Iger is running out of people to blame."
It's the revelation that nobody cares which will hurt Disney more than anything else. For all the protection they've attempted over their precious sequel trilogy and The Last Jedi... they've now reached the undeniable dead end we all predicted. Nobody cares about Star Wars any longer. And that's why perhaps the only cheap ploy they have left would be to bring back George Lucas for a meaningless credit and defense against critics. It won't help. But that doesn't mean they won't try it.
Your pal,
Pro
Comments
Elijah Snow
I feel like Caroline is brave enough she might actually do interviews with your channels if Forbes keeps yanking her chain. Them muzzling her prior to the earnings call was REALLY OBVIOUS.
Reier Gotter
Disney would have been better off buying Star Wars and doing nothing with it other than releasing new toys and merch off of the existing George Lucas portion. As Lorne says in your videos, Disney has failed to bring the next generation in SW and chased the loyal fans away. Not even George coming back could change that.
