It’s been a little big over a year now that George Lucas signed over his empire to Disney, and it was a surprising move because we always figured George would be running the show no matter what. Yet perhaps as he’s approaching his 70th birthday Lucas wants to focus on other things, and enjoy spending time with his new family.
Now Variety tells us that another Lucas creation, Indiana Jones, is under the Disney umbrella as well. All the previous Indy films were made at Paramount, but under this new deal, Disney will have the distribution and marketing rights to the future Indy movies, and they also got the ownership rights of the character in the Lucas deal.
Paramount will keep the rights to the previous movies, and will get a piece of the action if more Indy films are made from here. There have indeed been some rumblings about another Indy movie, and we at TGD recently reported that Ford may be using the potential of another turn as Indy as his bargaining chip to come back for the next Star Wars flick.
Variety reports that Steven Spielberg would be interested in coming back to direct another Indy film, and Lucas could help out in an advisor role, much like he’s been mentoring JJ Abrams with Star Wars.
At least one website has questioned whether there should be another Indy film (actually, two, you can add us to that list as well), and in this writer’s humble opinion, the magic of Raiders will never be recaptured again. Raiders still holds up very well after all this time, and all the crappy sequels won’t tarnish it, but why run the risk of adding more crappy follow ups to the pile?
If someone thinks they can reboot Indy successfully, bring it, although once you nuke the fridge, it’s hard to recover.
