The problem, Iger suggests, is that Lucas didn’t fully appreciate what Lucasfilm and Disney were trying to do with the new trilogy, and specifically The Force Awakens. In this one, he said, ‘There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.’ He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars.” In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies.

Following a private screening, Iger recalls, Lucas “didn’t hide his disappointment. Things didn’t improve when Lucas saw the finished movie. 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.”Īdded the CEO: “George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.” “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. “George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations,” Iger writes. Abrams and Michael Arndt met to discuss the new trilogy, and specifically the 2015 installment. In the book, Iger explains that Disney purchased Lucas’ outlines for three new movies when it made a deal to acquire Lucasfilm in 2012 - although that purchase was, in part, made out of a sense of obligation, it’s suggested “e decided we needed to buy them,” the chief exec writes of the decision made with studio head Alan Horn, “though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines he’d laid out.”Īs it turned out, Disney and Lucasfilm didn’t follow Lucas’ lead for the new movies, a decision Lucas discovered when Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars: The Force Awakens writers J.J.

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