Walt Disney Company announced that it will buy Lucasfilm, the film production company best known for making the Star Wars series, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash.
This is a big day for George Lucas, the world renowned geek screenwriter, director who is the chairman and 100 percent owner of Lucasfilm.
In a press release announcing the acquisition, Disney announced that Star Wars Episode 7 is should release in 2015 and that “more feature films expected to continue the Star Wars saga and grow the franchise well into the future.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger said that in addition to Episode 7, episodes 8 and 9 are also in the works. The goal, Iger said, was to “release a new Star Wars feature film every two to three years[COMIC].”
This deal also shows how serious Disney is about technology— this is the third major M&A deal it has completed in recent years in this space. In 2006, Disney acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion, and in 2009 it acquired Marvel for $4 billion.
The other subsdiaries of Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and SKywalker Sound are also moving to Disney. The plan is to keep all Lucasfilm employees at its current San Francisco headquarters.
Lucas’s company is known to combine the beauties of tech and showbiz for some 35 years, employing a number of graphic designers and engineers at its headquarters in San Francisco. The Company has been an outlier of sorts from the rest of the entertainment business, which is generally known for running out of Southern California.