I can’t prove it, but I swore I read when George Lucas sold his company to Disney, not releasing the original cuts was a condition.
Maybe that’s true, but there was an expiration on it. Dunno.It stems from people at LFL being cagey about it for so long. Kennedy, Hidalgo, made weird comments when asked after the Disney sale so people naturally assumed they’d got a contractual reason behind the scenes. Unless this has recently changed or they were just saying this for personal rather than legal reasons to stay friends with George.
Yeah, I think a lot of people took Kathleen’s “Those belong to George” remark totally out of context to mean that the original cuts literally weren’t part of the sale. What I think she actually meant was that Lucasfilm had no plans to alter the films any further than what Lucas had overseen and signed off on throughout the years. They were ‘his’ films in the sense that he created, paid for and oversaw their production, so they would be left in their final state in accordance to his wishes out of respect. All of the digital tweaking done over the years was George’s thing that he did when he still controlled what was done with the films. I don’t think Kathleen or anyone else within Lucasfilm had any desire to add further rounds digital tweaking and re-editing to the Lucas era films just for the sake of carrying on what had become a bizarre obsessive/compulsive tradition for George over the years. Their primary focus was creating new content from the IP, not further fiddling around with George’s old stuff without his say.