John Landis, the director of comedy classics like The Blues Brothers and Animal House, is good friends with George Lucas and let some very interesting information drop at a Q&A session over the weekend. He claimed that Disney is planning on releasing the original original versions of the first three Star Wars films on Blu-ray.
The news spread thanks to Empire Magazine tweeting from the event and reporting Landis’ comments. The Q&A session is also on YouTube in case you don’t believe that he actually said it.
Landis was asked by a member of the audience if he would ever go back and change effects in his films, like Lucas or Steven Spielberg. During his answer (which was no because he doesn’t own his movies like Lucas), he casually dropped the news.
“Did you know Disney, by the way, is putting out the original Star Wars... the way it was?” Landis said. “Yeah... [it’s like] money on the floor!”
Lucas has made countless changes to the original Star Wars films over the years. The hope has been that, since he no longer owns the movies, Disney will finally release the original films as audiences saw them. Unfortunately, even if Disney plans on such a release, it might not come for several years, as 20th Century Fox still has distribution rights to the Star Wars films. In addition, Fox owns the first Star Wars film, as it was made before Lucas created Lucasfilm as an individual entity.
In the meantime, we can only cross our fingers and hope that Landis wasn’t just making things up.