Apparently Disney intends to reap as much money as it can out of its aquisition of Lucasfilm in as short a period of time as possible:
Walt Disney Pictures and Lucasfilm announced today at CinemaCon in Las Vegas that Star Wars: Episode VII will hit theaters in the summer of 2015 and that every summer after that will offer a “Star Wars” film, alternating with one of the standalone films.
We knew they were targeting “Episode VII” for 2015, but a summer date had not yet been confirmed. Also, while it was known they were working on standalone films, the fact that we’ll be getting a “Star Wars” movie every summer is a new development.
As one industry writer puts it, this is a pretty aggressive strategy:
We’ve known that Disney has been working with the idea of doing many new Star Wars films, beginning with the announcement that there could be one every two to three years, as stated when Disney bought LucasFilm. We’ve also heard that spin-offs might alternate with the core storyline. But this is the first studio confirmation of a plan, and also a pretty aggressive statement. Disney really isn’t messing around with the Star Wars franchise.
Well if by messing around you mean “engaging in a strategy designed to make as much money as possible in a short period of time, you’d be right. But it strikes me that they risk over-saturating the market by going this route. To some degree, that’s what happened with Star Trek starting in the mid-1990s. It was only until the 2009 re-boot that the franchise really started to revive itself. The sequel to the reboot is being released some four years after the original movie came out. Maybe Disney’s strategy will work, but it strikes me that they’re taking a big risk here, especially if the fans react to the movie in the same way they did the Prequels.
