If you detected a somewhat urgent tone in the recent Star Wars Blu-ray release, perhaps you can attribute it to George Lucas’ emphatic belief that the world will end in 2012, meaning there’s only a scant year and change left for merchandising opportunities. Lucas’ insistent adherence to ancient Mayan prophesy—much like his position that laser guns make sounds in the vacuum of space—may have been widely discredited by scientists, but that didn’t stop him from going off on a lengthy tangent about impending apocalypse during a recent meeting with Steven Spielberg and, for some reason, Seth Rogen, who spread the word:
“George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it… He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, ‘My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry…’ I first thought he (Lucas) was joking… and then I totally realized he was serious and then I started thinking, ‘If you’re George Lucas and you actually think the world is gonna end in a year, there’s no way you haven’t built a spaceship for yourself… So I asked him… ‘Can I have a seat on it?’ He claimed he didn’t have a spaceship, but there’s no doubt there’s a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go… It’s gonna be him and Steven Spielberg and I’ll be blown up like the rest of us.”
Suddenly Lucas’ plan to rerelease all of the Star Wars films in 3-D one year apart, beginning with The Phantom Menace in 2012, seems like one giant, “goodbye cruel world” middle finger. (Also, how do the Dark Overlords of the Universe factor into this?) [via Movieline]