[livinginfear]

> George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind...

Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent?

> We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits.

Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO selling household cleaning products.

[kevindamm]

"As a protocol droid, I cannot actually recommend the best smelling cleaning product, but these are the most purchased cleaning products:"

...followed by a semi-hallucinated list containing at least a few being marketed by C3PO.

[lovecg]

Centralization makes a difference here I think. Disney built an impressive machine where everything feeds on everything else. The problem is not so much bad sequels per se, it’s all the marketing that goes into making sure they solidly occupy their corner of our mindshare and force the whole industry to compete churning out more and more subpar sequels. If one company would build a Star Wars theme park, another produced toys etc. etc. this might not be a huge concern.