Star Wars Bits: Zack Snyder Doesn't Want To Direct 'Star Wars', Jimmy Smits Maybe Willing To Return, ILM To Save Disney $20M A Year
As we anxiously wait to hear who'll get to helm the next Star Wars, it seems there's at least one name we can definitively rule out. Man of Steel helmer Zack Snyder says that he, for one, doesn't want the coveted gig. The (understandable) reason? It's just a lot to take on.
"I don't think I'd be interested in [directing it]," he said in an interview with the LAT. "I'm a huge Star Wars fanatic. I just think doing seven, eight, and nine is just a slippery slope. It's a whole other mythological experiment I'm excited to see, but it's a lot of effort."
After the jump, Jimmy Smits might be open to returning, while Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic saves Disney a ton of money.
"If they want to call, let them call," he said. But that may speak less to his feelings about the series than the fact that his character was killed off in A New Hope, making Organa's reappearance unlikely if Star Wars VII picks up after the original trilogy as rumored. "My character was gone after episode whatever," Smits noted.
He did, however, sound more enthusiastic about the general prospect of a new trilogy. "Congratulations to George [Lucas], because that was like a mega deal," he said. "It's great that it will kind of live on in a different kind of incarnation. There's more stories to tell, of course, I think." [Comic Book Resources]
For all the talk about Star Wars, that franchise isn't the only part of Lucasfilm likely to make Disney's $4 billion purchase a sound investment. The Mouse House now also owns the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, which George Lucas founded in 1975 for Star Wars. Over the decades, the shop has worked on hundreds of films and earned quite a pretty penny in the process — analyst Tony Wible estimates that ILM raked in $100 million in revenue last year alone.
And Disney, of course, is often one of their customers, with projects like Pirates of the Caribbean series, The Avengers, and the upcoming Lone Ranger. Wible observes that a $200 million tentpole can spend up to a third of its budget on effects, so with ILM now in-house, he says, Disney can save up to $20 million a year.
True, that seems like a drop in the bucket compared to Lucasfilm's $4 billion price tag — but it'll add up over the years, and ILM's continued work with other studios will bring even more revenue into Disney. "It's one of the underappreciated aspects of the deal," Wible said. [Disney Digital Files]