Bob Iger
The Disney era of Star Wars began under the clueless direction of Robert Iger. Iger is the legitimate incarnation of everything wrong with vulture capitalism: a narcissistic, arrogant, greedy, and uncreative asshole who even the likes of Wall Street’s Gordon Greco and Total Recall’s Vilos Cohaagen have nothing against him.
After being appointed CEO following the ouster of Michael Eisner following his failed attempt to get Comcast to acquire Disney, Iger made it a priority for Disney to acquire third party companies to increase its catalog and to offshore the potential challengers of Netflix and Amazon. Acquiring Pixar in 2012, Marvel in 2012, and 20th Century Fox in 2019, Iger transformed Disney into a monopolistic corporation that brought in a substantial amount of delusional shills to consume the next Disney product. Iger was known to not take creative risks as they would ultimately lead to financial ruin and prefer to reorganize Disney’s film division to focus entirely on franchises. For example, the Walt Disney Pictures label now mainly focuses on live action remakes.
With this in mind, Iger had his sights on Star Wars as he passive aggressively attempted to persuade George to sell Lucasfilm to Disney even back in 2011. Ultimately burnt out by prequel backlash and neither of his family interested in running Lucasfilm, George ultimately sold the company to Iger in 2012. While Iger allowed George’s hire of Kathleen Kennedy to run Lucasfilm, Iger showed his true colors to George by throwing away his sequel trilogy outline and prefer the inexperienced and clueless Kennedy to start from stretch. Pointing out the recent success of The Avengers (in which Disney didn’t see much profit as original distributor Paramount got some of them) and the overwhelming positive reception of Marvel’s planned outline, Iger sought Star Wars to be a annual franchise with multiple spin-offs and trilogies for years.
Ultimately, as you have to have a hammer to build a house, Iger had zero understanding of Star Wars. Multiple projects were either on hold or shelved due to multiple departures and the mixed to negative reviews to the sequel trilogy led to Iger’s Disney to regulate Star Wars to their new streaming service launched in 2019.
Retiring in 2021, Iger left the Star Wars brand in the grave due to his lazy ambitions and in creative work ethic. He also leaves Disney in massive debts as they are widely rumored to be bought out by Apple in the coming years. Bob Iger is a cautionary tale of how corporate greed can destroy a franchise you love.