Was Disney's 2012 purchase of Lucasfilm a good deal?

2022 marks the ten-year point since George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company, laying the groundwork for the return of the franchise to the big screen, as well as its current incarnation as the critical darling of the Disney+ streaming service, thanks to Andor.

The sale in 2012 cost Disney $5.905 billion, split between $4.05 billion in cash, and an additional $1.855 billion in Disney stock for George Lucas; that latter part might have ballooned to somewhere in the region of $7 billion in the decade since, although that’s more good luck on Lucas’ part than anything that cost Disney any more than it had 10 years ago. Almost six billion dollars is a lot of money, so, a decade later, it might be time to ask: was it worth it?

Estimating the actual value of the Star Wars franchise in 2022 isn’t easy; for one thing, the franchise has moved from being primarily a cinematic franchise with associated merchandise to being something that exists in the streaming space as well as having a massive publishing and merchandising program behind it.

Disney's Star Wars movies and TV shows

As such, box office results prove an increasingly unreliable indicator of the actual health of Star Wars, which might be a good thing: as is clear from seeing the fates of both Solo: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, audiences were proving increasingly less enamored with the idea of headed to theaters to keep up with the series on the big screen — according to independent estimates, Rise of Skywalker made less in profit than Rogue One: A Star Wars Story three years earlier; worse still, Solo cost Disney somewhere in the region of $77 million.

...the amount Disney actually made basically drops to a third: somewhere in the region of $1.9 billion...

All told, the total box office haul of the Disney era of Star Wars adds up to almost 6 billion dollars — an estimated $5,927,976,758, if you’re curious — which, all told, basically covers the price tag for buying Lucasfilm in the first place. Or, rather, it would, if you didn’t have to factor in the cut taken by movie theaters, production costs of the movies, and the associated promotion and distribution costs. Once you do that, the amount Disney actually made basically drops to a third: somewhere in the region of $1.9 billion, is independent estimates are to be believed.

Disney's Star Wars outside the movies and TV shows

Thankfully, the true value of Star Wars as a profit-generating enterprise is far away from the multiplex — or, for that matter, the streaming service, although it’s undeniable that the stream (no pun intended) of new Star Wars shows on the service has to be