camazotz said:
Lucas has not sold the rights to anyone; also, all the EU content, regardless of continuity, gets approved through a specific process and a series of individuals who are hired for the purpose of coordinating licensed tie-ins. Licensed products do not hand over the continuity rights to the licensees....they just let that particular publisher dabble in the Star Wars franchise in exchange for a hefty percentage of sales, and the publisher still has to conform to and get approval from Lucas's staff assigned to the job. Essentially, expanded universe stuff is never official canon, until it gets adopted by Lucas Films in the movies.
Lucas is also often noted as being very business savy when it comes to tie-in merchandise; his original contract on Star Wars insured he had control of and got all profits to the merchandise and toys sold as a restult of the movie; film companies never do that anymore, as a direct result of Star Wars's massive success and all the profits they lost out on as a result of this. This works, as I understand it, such that all the tie-in content anyone ever sees out there is ultimately owned by Lucas; yeah, Dark Horse may write those comics and sell them, but Lucas ultimately owns all of it.
Also, Lucas never planned to do sequels (according to his last statements on the matter) because the process was too time consuming and gruelling, and he didn't (at the time) have a sufficiently strong vision of what a sequel series would be about. That, it seems, has changed.
EDIT: It is now about beating Avatar in box office sales, it seems!
You would be incorrect here.
While it's hard to find stuff about now due to the resolution, there was a time post-Jedi when George Lucas felt he could not make any money off the franchise anymore. He sold the entire thing to Dark Horse comics flat out. No liscencing involved, sort of like how the rights to Fallout were purchused by Bethesda.
If you've ever heard of something called "Shadows Of The Empire" the big deal with it at the time was that it was one piece of the continuity that George Lucas was going to allow to remain Canon as part of the eventual settlement (such as it was, he pretty much used his influance as creator of an iconic franchise to get courts to hand it back to him irregardless of the laws... claiming he was duped or something like that. It's been many years).
The same thing happened with the young adult novels that I mentioned, the Rancor riding witches, lost city of the Jedi, and some other elements are leftovers from that. It ended similarly.
When it comes to the sequels in writing now, I don't know the legal status of them, but I am guessing he sold the rights, because a lot of writers... including some "names" like RA Salvatore (especially when he was writing Star Wars) have produced some of these books and if they didn't have the right to produce canon and control over their property I doubt they would have been involved.
I don't think the timeline really matters so much as the simple fact that George Lucas can't do anything in the future after the original trilogy without permission. The past and time period of the original triologies are one thing, but this is something else.
Now, I could of course be wrong, however I seem to remember a lot of this was being discussed back when "The Phantom Menace" was coming out and people were wondering why he was bothering with Prequels instead of sequels.
We'll see what happens, but when push comes to shove, if he declares the intent I'd be very interested in seeing where guys like RA Salvatore, and Timothy Zahn stand on it.
If George Lucas had simply been selling liscences (money in exchange for permission to produce a product) that would have been one thing, however the "Dark Horse" incident and what apparently happened with those young adult novels are not matters of liscencing as I said. Both coming fromt he fact that George Lucas pretty much sold the rights to what he saw as a dead franchise at the time.
