Star Wars was originally created by the company Lucasfilm that was owned by George Lucas. Lucas executively produced the first six Star Wars movies that turned Star Wars into an extremely impactful pop-culture phenomenon and developed into a transmedia franchise (Peters, 2012). However, after its independent existence for over 40 years and enormous success, the company was bought by media conglomerate Disney in 2012 for 4.05 billion USD. This entailed that all the licensing of both Star Wars and Indiana Jones (which was also part of Lucasfilm) is currently owned by Disney. This includes not only the licensing of these IP’s but also other forms of media such as movies, books, games and the studios that produced them (Proctor, 2013).
At the same time, Disney was acquiring more assets including multiple large IP’s such as Marvel in 2009 and animation studio Pixar in 2006, which was also part of Lucasfilm in the past (Brookey & Zhang, 2020). More recently, Disney bought 20th Century Fox studios which owns a plethora of famous movies and TV shows such as Titanic and the Simpsons (Brookey & Zhang, 2020).
After Disney took over the Star Wars franchise, it added many pieces of media to its collection. Apart from three new movies that are part of the (main) Skywalker saga, Disney also produced two standalone Star Wars movies and a number of animated TV shows. Moreover, there were also several live-action TV series created that take place in the Star Wars universe, the first of which was “The Mandalorian” in 2019 (Hoolihan, 2024).