Maybe, but I’m not so sure just how much loyalty they’ll feel once they start feeling the pressure from the higher ups at Disney to make them as much money as possible by any means necessary.
The money Disney is losing isn’t about to be made up by releasing the Original Trilogy to Disney+, though. That’s not feasible or plausible. Lucasfilm is already driving a lot of traffic to that platform (and to Disney in general) as it is and it’s not really having much of an effect on those losses, because those losses aren’t really FROM the movies division. Disney’s losses are being most strongly felt in the parks being closed, and sports being gone. Theaters being closed is hurting them, yes, but that’s not a particularly large concern in the face of their owning their own streaming network. They just moved the Hamilton release up a year and a half, for example.
As for George, half of that $4 billion he got paid in the sale was in Disney stock, not actual cash. It’s in his interest to see the company do well,
The original versions aren’t big enough for that to be a concern. They just aren’t. It’s not a money thing. Lucasfilm just doesn’t want to do it right now. They probably will, eventually. But there’s no weird conspiracy behind it. No contractual stipulations, no distribution problems. And it’s not a spite thing, either. They just… don’t want to do it.
For now.
When they do, it probably won’t be due to money concerns, either.
Who said anything about Disney+? They’ll probably never do that. I was talking about physical media. Highly unlikely it’ll happen this year or next, since they just released the UHD’s barely a month and a half ago, but Disney’s still got another Star Wars movie pencilled in for the end of 2022. Sounds like the perfect occasion for an expensive holiday-timed multi-disc collector’s set with the unaltered and ‘97 versions thrown in.
They could give the prequels the same treatment, maybe with the Imax cut of AotC although that’s a long shot. Even the Disney-era stuff had conspicuously absent stuff like, for example, any mention at all of Harrison Ford’s leg injury on TFA, and deleted scenes for Rogue One, Solo, and TRoS. They could always throw in the 3D version just to add an extra disc to all 11 films and up the price point.
Look, I’m not saying they’ll “need” to do any of this out of financial desperation. But what I am saying is that a barebones UHD with previously released extras (extras they couldn’t take the time to properly author, apparently) can’t possibly be the last disc-based release of Star Wars.