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Rogue One Box Office


Poe Dameron
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Adjusted is the only list that matters

 

Speaking of which, Rogue One passed Revenge of the Sith on the Adjusted list a couple days ago.

 

 

 

I was surprised when I got my digital copy ANH to see the Fox intro was gone, replaced just by the Lucasfilm logo. I know Disney has the IP, but this means home video distribution is all theirs too. Even George shared those with Fox.

 

Fox holds the digital distribution rights to ANH (and all other forms of distribution) forever. Disney got the digital and television rights to the other 5 Original and Prequel movies. I can only imagine that the Fox logo was removed in ANH through negotiations between them and Disney in order to make them all available for digital sale at the same time.

 

Fox still has control of the theatrical, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of Episodes 1-6 until 2020. Has anyone bought a set in the last year or two that can confirm whether or not the Fox logo has been removed in those releases?

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i just double checked my digital copies-- all Lucasfilm only save for ANH, which still has the Fox logo and fanfare. I stand corrected!

Yeah same here - I only have 2 of the prequels digital but no sign of Fox. Not surprising, Lucas I'll give criticism over a lot but no one has f**ked Fox over in a contract as royally as he did, and for that he deserves infinite praise.

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Didn't they let him keep 100% of the proceeds because they expected Star Wars to flop, or something? Maybe I'm thinking of Kenner in regard to the toys. Or maybe they both did the same thing!

Anyway, Star Wars feels weird without the 20th Century Fox logo and fanfare, which is why I'm glad I own The Complete Saga Blu-Ray set which came out in 2012, before the Disney buyout. Aside from a few undesired alterations, it is my definitive, Zerimar's-official-stamp-of-approval version. (Actually, five of the six films from this box set are my definitive edition, along with Adywan's edit of A New Hope.)

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The deal was when ANH was going over-budget and Fox threatened to pull the plug, Lucas offered to give back his director's fee in exchange for exclusive ownership of the IP, which means sequels and merchandising rights were his alone. Since FOX expected it to bomb, they thought they were getting money, and Lucas was getting literally nothing.

 

It's probably one of the biggest coups in film deal history.

 

Lucas had planned to make a sequel either way with another studio, or a small budget. Alan Dean Foster had ghost written the ANH novelization in exchange for getting his name on a sequel book. He and Lucas cooked up Splinter of the Mind's eye, which would have been a smaller, more intimate movie. He pushed Foster to get it out ASAP to as a proof of concept and to keep the IP relevant.

 

But then Star Wars was obviously a monster hit and Fox begged him to come back and make the sequel with them, offering him all the money he needed.

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I've heard it a couple different ways, but according to Lucas's agent, Fox kept the merchandise rights for Star Wars at first. It wasn't until they were negotiating for The Empire Strikes Back that Lucas was able to tell Fox that he wanted the merchandise rights back or he was going with a different studio.

 

Basically, Lucas completely screwed over Fox not once, but twice. The first time by keeping the sequel rights, the second time by leveraging the first sequel to prise loose the merchandising rights.

 

So in the negotiations that were going on, we drew up a contract with Fox’s head of business affairs Bill Immerman, and me. We came to an agreement that George would retain the sequel rights. Not all the rest of the stuff that came later, mind you; just the sequel rights. And Fox would get a first opportunity and last refusal right to make the movie.

...

In that deal for The Empire Strikes Back, George made the decision to self-finance the film. Lucasfilm made a lot of money on Star Wars and would reinvest the money in the movie. The deal that was offered to Fox was, you get distribution rights theatrically and video around the world for seven years, and we retain everything else. And, by the way, we want the merchandising back. Fox had started with the merchandising in that first year, or two, and did very well too. He wanted the merchandising back as of the time Empire came out. That meant soundtrack albums, music publishing, television, all rights other than the rights we were granting to Fox under this deal. We tried to get the first deal back so he would own Star Wars, but Fox refused to sell it and rightfully so and they have it to this day.

 

Problem is, I'm not sure how credible he is. His mention of a bidding war for Raiders of the Lost Ark is contradicted by the usual story that all the studios turned that movie down.

 

The thing about Lucas paying for the movie himself has multiple sources though. It wasn't about Fox giving him enough money, Lucas himself has talked about how he was able to dictate terms to Fox because he was the one financing ESB. He seems rather proud of himself on that point.

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Sometimes I wish I could travel to an alternate universe where Star Wars flopped, just so I could see the what the movie version of Splinter would have been like. Always had that idle curiosity.

The problem I had with Splinter of the Mind's Eye was that it was tough to let go of the fact that ESB happened.
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Sometimes I wish I could travel to an alternate universe where Star Wars flopped, just so I could see the what the movie version of Splinter would have been like. Always had that idle curiosity.

 

Meh. There's very little about Splinter of the Mind's Eye that I really want to see. It's a boring story where not really all that much happens and then everything is resolved when Vader randomly falls down a hole (you can't even blame that on budget restraints). It'd be like one step up from an Ewoks movie.

 

If we're talking about unmade Star Wars movies, the one that I've always wanted to see purely as a curiosity would be taking one of Lucas's original drafts and producing it.

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I've heard it a couple different ways, but according to Lucas's agent, Fox kept the merchandise rights for Star Wars at first. It wasn't until they were negotiating for The Empire Strikes Back that Lucas was able to tell Fox that he wanted the merchandise rights back or he was going with a different studio.

 

Basically, Lucas completely screwed over Fox not once, but twice. The first time by keeping the sequel rights, the second time by leveraging the first sequel to prise loose the merchandising rights.

 

So in the negotiations that were going on, we drew up a contract with Fox’s head of business affairs Bill Immerman, and me. We came to an agreement that George would retain the sequel rights. Not all the rest of the stuff that came later, mind you; just the sequel rights. And Fox would get a first opportunity and last refusal right to make the movie.

...

In that deal for The Empire Strikes Back, George made the decision to self-finance the film. Lucasfilm made a lot of money on Star Wars and would reinvest the money in the movie. The deal that was offered to Fox was, you get distribution rights theatrically and video around the world for seven years, and we retain everything else. And, by the way, we want the merchandising back. Fox had started with the merchandising in that first year, or two, and did very well too. He wanted the merchandising back as of the time Empire came out. That meant soundtrack albums, music publishing, television, all rights other than the rights we were granting to Fox under this deal. We tried to get the first deal back so he would own Star Wars, but Fox refused to sell it and rightfully so and they have it to this day.

 

Problem is, I'm not sure how credible he is. His mention of a bidding war for Raiders of the Lost Ark is contradicted by the usual story that all the studios turned that movie down.

 

The thing about Lucas paying for the movie himself has multiple sources though. It wasn't about Fox giving him enough money, Lucas himself has talked about how he was able to dictate terms to Fox because he was the one financing ESB. He seems rather proud of himself on that point.

The version I've heard and also recently read about in a Lucas bio (Brian Jay Jones and I don't know how reputable he is) is that he always had the merchandising rights - he used the sales on a lot of the merchandising to help self-finance Empire. It was his foresight into merchandising that helped him create his own empire - there are references to him already thinking about R2D2 cookie jars while he was still writing and developing ANH.

 

But he didn't have enough money to finance all of Empire as well as set up Lucasfilm, so he offered Fox a couple more points on the deal to go guarantor on a loan for more money, but didn't want to get more money from them directly or they would have tried to re-negotiate the deal & sequel rights. But like you said, have heard a few differing versions on this.

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Sometimes I wish I could travel to an alternate universe where Star Wars flopped, just so I could see the what the movie version of Splinter would have been like. Always had that idle curiosity.

 

Meh. There's very little about Splinter of the Mind's Eye that I really want to see. It's a boring story where not really all that much happens and then everything is resolved when Vader randomly falls down a hole (you can't even blame that on budget restraints). It'd be like one step up from an Ewoks movie.

 

If we're talking about unmade Star Wars movies, the one that I've always wanted to see purely as a curiosity would be taking one of Lucas's original drafts and producing it.

 

Well, Dark Horse Comics produced a comic adaption of the first draft of the original script, which I found to be quite an enjoyable read.

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That version with a dialog polish is more or less what I expected Episode 1 to be.

 

For what it's worth, Lucas seems to have based The Phantom Menace's broad story on the Rough Draft. Both of them are a story of a master and his young apprentice spiriting a young queen away from an invading army looking to use her to legitimize their attack and ends with finding alien allies to fight with them and win back her throne.

 

The tone of the two are quite different as well as pretty much all the beats (the Original Trilogy ended up using a lot of the ideas), but the skeleton is there if you look for it. Not to mention all the Rough Draft names that found their way into the Prequels (Whitesun, Valorum, Mace, Clieg, etc.).

 

 

 

Well, Dark Horse Comics produced a comic adaption of the first draft of the original script, which I found to be quite an enjoyable read.

 

Yeah, I'm glad they did that.

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That version with a dialog polish is more or less what I expected Episode 1 to be.

For what it's worth, Lucas seems to have based The Phantom Menace's broad story on the Rough Draft. Both of them are a story of a master and his young apprentice spiriting a young queen away from an invading army looking to use her to legitimize their attack and ends with finding alien allies to fight with them and win back her throne.

 

Which is why when the first few rumors and spy pics came out I was SO amped and excited. That just set me up for a major disappointment.

 

I plan to use it as a basis when I make Episode 10. With Old Grandma Rey in place of Kenobi.

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