By: Henry J. Fromage –

Obviously, the absolutely massive news from this week was Disney’s purchase of LucasFilm for 4.05 Billion.  That fat chunk of change gets them the rights to the Star Wars universe, and they immediately announced Star Wars: Episode 7 for 2015, with new movies in the franchise landing every two years or so until the unlikely day when they become unprofitable.  I won’t speculate on what direction those will go, as the rest of the Internet is already doing that in every conceivable fashion, but with a 2015 release date expect entertainment news to be dominated by this every time a new piece of the puzzle slips into place.

More interesting to me is what else comes in the deal.  Indiana Jones is a bit of a morass, as Paramount still owns distribution rights to that, so perhaps we’ll be spared yet another sequel there, at least for the time being.  However, one toy they’re likely to play with sooner rather than later is VFX and Animation house Industrial Light & Magic.  They made their big animation debut with Rango, and now make the third separate accomplished animation division that Disney owns, as well as the home of the only non-Disney project Gore Verbinski’s directed in the last seven years.

You’ll never escape us, Verbinski!

Speaking of out of nowhere reboots… Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to star as Conan the Barbarian once more.  The Legend of Conan will go ahead and pretend that Jason Momoa movie didn’t exist and pick up the story of Conan as an aging king who must fight one last great battle.

Hopefully he’ll have discovered shirts at some point in his fifty years of rule

Let’s just keep talking fan-favorite and potentially overplayed franchises, shan’t we?  The continuation of the X-Men universe, X-Men: Days of Future Past, will apparently follow a time jumping/multiple universe-spawning storyline, but return all of the principal cast from X-Men: First Class.  Intriguing, but even more so is the return of director Bryan Singer to the franchise, after he essentially fathered it with the first two X-Men movies and continued to produce afterwards.  The director of First Class, Matthew Vaughn, will swap chairs with him, writing the treatment and producing the film.

Brett Ratner will continue doing whatever it is he does