Bob Iger Interviewed on Bloomberg, talks Hasbro and Lucasfilm

Bob Iger was interviewed yesterday on Bloomberg News about Disney quarterly results, and after wading through a number of questions about every aspect of the Disney business except films, the talk got around to Hasbro and the Lucasfilm acquisition. It’s worth listening to the entire interview in part because it shows the full scope of Iger’s responsibilities and puts the movie division in context — item 7 on an 8 item interview. There’s also a point where he says “it’s not often we work on more than one big acquisition at once” – which I think is a very interesting acknowledgment of the world as seen from the Disney CEO’s perspective. For him, an acquisition is almost analogous to making a movie — it’s something that has a lasting impact, takes a lot of time, and doesn’t lend itself to trying to do two different ones at once.

Here’s the interview — the talk of Hasbro and Lucasfilm starts at 6:30. There is also a transcript of that portion of the interview after the video.

How would you describe your relationship with Habro
We have a good relationship with Hasbro. We license a lot of Marvel products through them. And they also have a relationship with Lucasfilm, so once that deal closes our relationship with Hasbro will expand. And as to the rumors about an acquisition, we don’t comment about such things, it’s just generally what we’ve avoided over the years. We just announced a pretty big acquisition last week from Lucasfilm, and it’s not often that we’re working on two big ones at a time.

Have you received additional feedback from . . whether it’s fans or people in the industry . .and gotten more ideas on what you can do with the Star Wars franchise?

Yes, we have received feedback and in put from just about every sector of the … of society on this, which is actually something that we’ve taken note of, because what it does is it confirms what we believed when we announced the acquisition, and that is that this is an immensely popular franchise, not just in the United States, but for the world, not just for kids but for generations, it’s something that remains relevant and of interest to so many people, and that makes us feel great. We saw a lot of different ideas, some crazy, some tongue in cheek, the Death Star shaped in the form of a Mickey Mouse head was one of them for instance, I don’t think you’ll see us adopting that any time soon. But I’d say that the reaction has been generally very, very positive, from Wall Street and our investment community, from fans and just from people in general that follow Disney. It’s been great.