A man who knows a thing or two about empires, speaking at the Paley Center for Media’s discussion “Sports in the Gaming Era” about video games and the all-important IPO that have driven cinema, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner broached the topic of the purchade by Disney of Lucasfilm back in 2012, a move that Eisner believes was a very wise one indeed.
“We had nothing in the last 20 years, so we bought Star Wars from George Lucas and that worked,” he said in a slight exaggeration — Disney acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion in 2006, Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, and Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012.) Referring to the fans, he said “they are so committed to the IP that I realize that there are certain kinds of things that are worth doing.”
With gaming every bit as key to the future of Disney (and indeed all of entertainment) as streaming, film and TV, he also pointed to the repeated failures of Disney and other companies to push on in the world of video games.
Eisner traced the pattern back to the industry’s earliest attempts to enter gaming. “Warner Brothers started it all with Atari, 1983. They went under,” he said, adding that it took two more years for Nintendo’s Mario Brothers game to revive the format. (Indeed, Warner sold Atari in 1984 for a loss, and Super Mario Bros. was first released in 1985.) The problem wasn’t creative, he argued — it was technological illiteracy: gaming “was so technologically driven in the beginning, which was not the strong suit of any of us.”
Eisner also said that the industry has changed today, going from the technological limits of the past to leveraging IPs as an asset. “Now it’s story-driven,” he said. “Now it is IP-driven.”
He also remarked on sequelitis, and the danger of producing too many follow-ups in a world where tastes change faster than ever, a potentially huge obstacle for established franchises like Star Wars.
Eisner described franchise licensing as “a great way to get in,” but cautioned that companies relying exclusively on established brands risk exhausting audiences through endless sequels. He pointed to Disney’s current handling of the Star Wars IP as having perhaps “overstepped its bounds” from too many sequels.
Over the past decade, studios have increasingly leaned on large IPs as their main audience draw. But after years of billion-dollar smashes, several recent Marvel and Star Wars releases have fallen short of that level, with audiences becoming less and less interested, leading analysts to question whether they are leaving for other genres or, to Eisner’s point, some kind of fresh IP.