When it was announced that George Lucas had sold Lucasfilm to Disney, and that the studio would be producing a new series of Star Wars films with their newly purchased rights to the franchise, I was somewhat taken aback by my reaction.
Fan reactions, as film scholar and Star Wars fan William Proctor argues, dominated news reports following the announcement. Media outlets, benefitting from the immediacy of the internet, drew on comments from social media, suggesting they “had been run amok with fan voices expressing discontent, indifference and, at times, downright indignation” to the news. The necessary pithiness inherent in Twitter’s character limit provided an ample sampling of sound-bite worthy reactions, from the simply declinatory – “so apparently disney is buying lucasfilms for 4billion USD and then going to make a star wars 7. JUST NO” – to the downrightly apocalyptic – “the world really is ending! Disney bought Star Wars for over 4.5 [b]illion dollars and making more. We’re doomed.” For Proctor, these media reports were overly reductive, focusing on negative reactions to the news that were “non-representative of the Star Wars community,” given the “more varied and complex” comments he had read from fans of the franchise, whose feelings ranged from excitement and optimism, to anxiety, anger, antagonism, a wait-and-see agnosticism, or some intricate combination of these and other emotions. Continue reading
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