Post by Finarvyn on Aug 7, 2010 7:38:31 GMT -6
Found an interesting article here. I guess King George gave away half of his money a couple of days ago, then decided it was too expensive to make a Star Wars TV series. 
Text reproduced below:
Live-Action 'Star Wars' TV Show Too Expensive to Produce
How was anyone supposed to know that a massively intergalactic live-action Star Wars TV series would cost a lot of money to make? Only moments after agreeing to pledge at least half of his multi-billion dollar fortune to charity, beloved and endlessly loathed Star Wars creator George Lucas was cruelly reminded that unprecedentedly ambitious TV sagas don't come cheap. Comicbookmovie.com reports that Lucas recently offered fans a rare update of the series' status, saying that "The live-action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don't know how to do them." Lucas would later clarify that he was referring to the difficulties in funding such an ambitious project, and not a crippling inability to write scripts that aren't terrible, but the double meaning of his comment is nevertheless a painful reminder that Star Wars might be a franchise best left alone.
News about the show - first announced in 2005 - has been ominously mum during recent years, and so it's hardly surprising that the mammoth undertaking isn't going smoothly. Lucas explained that the episodes "Are literally Star Wars, only we're going to have to try to do them at a tenth the cost. And it's a huge challenge, a lot bigger than we thought it was gonna be." While it's very nice to hear that he's affording the project a respect and scale equal to its potential, I can't help but wonder how an updated budget for this thing so drastically eclipsed Lucas' original projections. You would think that if anyone knew how much it might cost to make a Star Wars TV show, it would be the guy who made and then partially re-made the Star Wars movies. But I guess at some point after the initial planning session he considered his legacy and decided to upgrade the show's ambition from "cash-in" to "sincere."
Of course, you can't help but feel for the guy - I imagine that it's a lot easier to pull the trigger on this sort of thing when you have an impressive net worth of 3 billion dollars as opposed to a totally pathetic stash of 1.5 billion measly dollars. Having said that, I feel it would be a shame not to pursue this idea given how much the rich and enormously vast sandbox the Star Wars universe provides, especially if the showrunners used the enormous built-in audience that comes with the brand as a safety-net to make some risky, challenging television - perhaps something more in line with Breaking Bad than Heroes (this is a suggestion of tone - I don't actually think the Star Wars show should be about meth).
In the meantime, George Lucas did something incredibly generous today, and it certainly seems as if we should defer to him as to how his money should be spent, at least for a little while. But next time, George, just give me the name of the charity - I'll skip out on the latest DVD re-issue and just donate directly.
Text reproduced below:
Live-Action 'Star Wars' TV Show Too Expensive to Produce
How was anyone supposed to know that a massively intergalactic live-action Star Wars TV series would cost a lot of money to make? Only moments after agreeing to pledge at least half of his multi-billion dollar fortune to charity, beloved and endlessly loathed Star Wars creator George Lucas was cruelly reminded that unprecedentedly ambitious TV sagas don't come cheap. Comicbookmovie.com reports that Lucas recently offered fans a rare update of the series' status, saying that "The live-action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don't know how to do them." Lucas would later clarify that he was referring to the difficulties in funding such an ambitious project, and not a crippling inability to write scripts that aren't terrible, but the double meaning of his comment is nevertheless a painful reminder that Star Wars might be a franchise best left alone.
News about the show - first announced in 2005 - has been ominously mum during recent years, and so it's hardly surprising that the mammoth undertaking isn't going smoothly. Lucas explained that the episodes "Are literally Star Wars, only we're going to have to try to do them at a tenth the cost. And it's a huge challenge, a lot bigger than we thought it was gonna be." While it's very nice to hear that he's affording the project a respect and scale equal to its potential, I can't help but wonder how an updated budget for this thing so drastically eclipsed Lucas' original projections. You would think that if anyone knew how much it might cost to make a Star Wars TV show, it would be the guy who made and then partially re-made the Star Wars movies. But I guess at some point after the initial planning session he considered his legacy and decided to upgrade the show's ambition from "cash-in" to "sincere."
Of course, you can't help but feel for the guy - I imagine that it's a lot easier to pull the trigger on this sort of thing when you have an impressive net worth of 3 billion dollars as opposed to a totally pathetic stash of 1.5 billion measly dollars. Having said that, I feel it would be a shame not to pursue this idea given how much the rich and enormously vast sandbox the Star Wars universe provides, especially if the showrunners used the enormous built-in audience that comes with the brand as a safety-net to make some risky, challenging television - perhaps something more in line with Breaking Bad than Heroes (this is a suggestion of tone - I don't actually think the Star Wars show should be about meth).
In the meantime, George Lucas did something incredibly generous today, and it certainly seems as if we should defer to him as to how his money should be spent, at least for a little while. But next time, George, just give me the name of the charity - I'll skip out on the latest DVD re-issue and just donate directly.
