
Which is a really dirty trick.Īnd as writer and activist Cory Doctorow notes in this Twitter thread, which you can find on the #DisneyMustPay hashtag along with lots more reaction from authors: Disney even told Foster that it won’t discuss the matter unless he signs a NDA before negotiations even commence. Disney is just ignoring Foster and its legal obligations to pay him. To make matters worse, according to Foster, Disney is refusing to meaningfully engage on the topic, using a common tactic of corporate bullies – i.e. In both cases, Foster says that the royalty checks stopped coming as soon as Disney took over. To make matters worse, Disney appears to be taking the same approach to the royalties from the Alien books, which it also owes Foster after acquiring 20 th Century Fox last year. To put a finer point on it, Disney seems to be saying that when it acquired the rights to Alan Dean Foster’s work it did not acquire the contractual obligation to pay royalties for the work. It seems that Disney has decided that when it purchased Lucasfilm, it acquired the assets but not its liabilities. And now it is alleged to be using corporate trickery to try and cheat an author out of the royalties he is contractually owed. Other subsidiaries you may have heard of include Searchlight, ABC Television, National Geographic, and FX Networks.ĭisney owns many of the most-loved media properties in America. In recent years, Disney has purchased Marvel Studios, along with all its notable IPs Lucasfilm, home to those Star Wars movies Pixar and then various properties from Fox as well. But what is Disney playing at? All Your IP Belong To Usĭisney has always been a mainstay of American life, but in the last decade or so it has swollen to epic proportions, gobbling up all sorts of popular properties and pushing its market capitalization to incredible heights: latest figures value the company at over $250bn – a valuation being propelled by staggering revenue figures, projected at around $65bn for 2020 alone. In other words, this isn’t some unknown or inexperienced author that Disney is pushing around. More recently, he returned to the Star Wars universe to write the novelization of The Force Awakens.

Alan dean foster books list series#
He worked on numerous media tie-ins for other valuable franchises like Star Trek, Alien, Transformers, Alien Nation, and Terminator, a whole plethora of standalone novelizations for movies like Krull, The Thing, Clash of the Titans, and The Last Starfighter, and also his own original novels like the Spellsinger series and the many Humanx Commonwealth books.

For example, Lucas instructed Foster to keep Han Solo out of the story, because Harrison Ford had not signed on for that sequel yet.įurther writers were hired as successive Star Wars movies were released, and the franchise grew in popularity and scope, while Alan Dean Foster moved on to other projects. George Lucas wasn’t entirely sure at that point how successful Star Wars would be and, crucially, how much of a budget he would have to play with for the sequel – which placed limitations on the kind of follow-up story Foster could write. Then the checks stopped coming.īack in the 1970s, Foster was contracted to write a sequel to that first tie-in, working from far less material this time. But Alan Dean Foster wrote the book, which is still in print, and he received royalty checks for it right up until the point that Disney acquired Lucasfilm.

Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker was based on a screenplay written by George Lucas and its his name that graced the front cover.

Alan dean foster books list serial#
Disney is accused of serial non-payment of royalties to Star Wars author Alan Dean Foster – in a move that could ultimately affect all published writers, prompting widespread calls that #DisneyMustPay.įoster wrote the first ever Star Wars novelization, released six months before that initial movie.
