wandastan

all too unwell

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The man who made Star Wars offered to pay for this whole museum himself, every brick and every painting inside it. The first two cities he picked couldn't get it built. He spent 16 years chasing it, and the theater in this photo is one room in the version that finally worked.

He started with San Francisco, where he built his film company. The people who control the land he wanted turned him down. So he moved the whole plan to Chicago, his wife's hometown, where the city basically handed him a prime spot by the lake on a 99 year lease for ten dollars. Then a local group took the city to court. Their argument was simple: the lakefront belongs to the public, and a city can't just sign it over to one private museum. A judge let the lawsuit go forward, construction was blocked, and after about two years of fighting, Lucas gave up and walked away. Los Angeles won it in 2017.

He paid for all of it himself, the building and everything in it. He also locked away a fund big enough to keep the place open for decades after he's gone. Cost was never the problem. Back in 2012 he sold Star Wars and the rest of his studio to Disney for around 4 billion dollars, and this museum is one of the things he chose to do with the money.

The art tells you why he bothered. It mixes famous paintings, old comic strips, and props pulled straight off his movie sets, including Darth Vader's helmet. Lucas calls all of it narrative art, which is a fancy way of saying art that tells a story. He's been hooked since college, when he couldn't afford paintings and bought cheap comic books instead. The building matches the man. A Chinese architect designed it to look like a spaceship that just landed, all curves and barely a straight edge anywhere, with a green lawn rolled across the roof. It runs five stories tall, with floor space about the size of five football fields, on what used to be a parking lot.

The theater you're looking at is one of two inside. It was supposed to open in 2021, then 2023, then 2025. The doors are finally opening on September 22, 2026, more than ten years after a broke college kid who bought comics because paintings cost too much set out to build a place to hang them.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

The first trailer for ‘X-MEN '97’ Season 2 has been released.

Releasing July 1 on Disney+

[The Sietch of Sci-Fi | @TSoS_]

I am honestly really surprised how capable of a fighter 11th Brother / The Crow turned out to be. He really held his own against anyone he fought this season.

Makes it all the more frustrating and inconsistent how he was killed in three seconds by an unarmed Ahsoka Tano. I really do not like the way many of these projects, specifically Filoni's Ahsoka stories, have used the Inquisitors as canon fodder. Seeing them as very capable fighters on par with many of the Jedi makes them far more interesting. #MaulShadowLord really managed to turn them into frightening villains. Hope to see more of them in Season 2.

[olive 🩵 @ct_girlie]

everyone claim your shirts before it's too late

[teen vampire, aged 40 @witchesflight]

It’s so upsetting that Stephanie Meyer has a TRUE FREAK inside her but the Mormonism pushed it down but we got a few glimmers and her mind could be SO powerful if she let it

[Sailor Moon Thailand Fanclub @SailorMoonTH]

OMG!!! New Sailor Moon art from Naoko Takeuchi-sensei! It’s so rare to see her drawing the Sailor Guardians in action poses like this! I'm absolutely obsessed!

[Sheila of the Most High @sheilatebra]

Anonymous

I kept my college roommate’s Netflix password after she died. Couldn’t bring myself to log out. Her profile was still there. “Sarah’s List.” Shows she never finished. Movies in her queue. I’d see it every time I logged in. Sometimes I’d click on her profile. See what she was watching. Feel close to her again.
Three years later I got a message through Netflix somehow. Her sister. “I noticed someone’s been keeping her profile active. The account is in my name now. Just wanted to say thank you. I was going to delete her profile but knowing someone still remembers her… it means everything. Keep watching if you want. She’d like that.”
I wrote back. Told her I was Sarah’s roommate. How we’d stayed up late watching terrible reality shows. How I couldn’t let go of that last connection. Her sister replied. “She talked about you all the time. Come over sometime. I have boxes of her stuff.
Maybe you’d want something.”
Went last month. Her sister gave me Sarah’s favorite hoodie. The one she lived in. We sat on her couch and finished the show Sarah never got to. Cried together during the finale. Started texting after that. Checking in. She’s basically my friend now.
Last week she said something that destroyed me. “I was going to cancel the account....
Couldn’t afford it. But then I saw someone using Sarah’s profile. Couldn’t take that away. You kept her alive for me. Thank you.”
We split the cost now. Both use Sarah’s profile. Keep her shows going. She’s still watching with us. In a way.....

[MasterofForceFields🫧 @HiddenStormy]

@Jug's F4 unpopular opinion post inspired me to make a short thread to explain how the recent Invincible Woman F4 storyline and First Steps perfectly highlights a part of Sue's own fandom that's part of why her and her powers are still so overlooked in the larger superhero fandom

[Miley Official @MileyCyrusBz]

I think we ALL have anniversaries

[Film Updates @FilmUpdates]

Meryl Streep says that Anne Hathaway told ‘THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2’ producers that “alarmingly thin” supermodels should not appear in the movie.

“I was struck by how not only beautiful and young — everyone seems young to me — but alarmingly thin the models were [at the Milan Fashion Week]. I thought that all had been addressed years ago. Annie clocked it too, and she made a beeline to the producers about it, securing promises that the models in the show that we were putting together for our film would not be so skeletal! She’s a stand-up girl.”

https://t.co/q7rtDWEqY5

[cat @dollshojo]

i really love how, in the original sailor moon anime, they resolved the season 1 conflict by going back in time and making everyone forget they ever met or became senshi, but did it so flawlessly while maintaining the emotional weight

[Miley Official @MileyCyrusBz]

She had the opportunity to make the most iconic thing ever and she did it.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys.

It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal.

Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise.

Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million.

And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion.

Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia.

The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

[Marciano Palácio @mars_palacio]

Empolgado demais pra conferir a nova série live-action de Scooby-Doo pra Netflix! 🐾🔎

[Miley Cyrus @MileyCyrus]

20 years in the making ❤️ The Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special premieres March 24 on @DisneyPlus and @hulu.

[thais 🤍 benophie 🪁 @benophiebase]

claudia saying she looks more like violet and edmund bridgerton than she does her own parents LMFAOOO 😭😭😭

[Buitengebieden @buitengebieden]

Therapist; “There is a tiger in you”

The tiger in me:

[montana @femsteverogers]

Me trying to explain this to my parents:
so dinoland just closed right? And universal opens a new store and the skull kind of looks like a Carnotaurus and they wrote "not our dino.." because they said it in the ride and also it said ship to Dr S (blurred) and thats Dr. Seeker

[montana @femsteverogers]

Obsessed with this new Dinoland reference in Islands of Adventure!!!!!

[Blaze Binges @BlazeBinges]

Does anyone remember Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog?

This show released in the same year as Power Rangers in Space!