Disney unlikely to change 'Star Wars' brand

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Naysayers would have you believe Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm can only mean one thing: Bambi and Mickey Mouse are sure to appear in future "Star Wars" movies taking up lightsabers against the dark side of the Force.

Not so, say experts who've watched Disney's recent acquisition strategy closely. If anything, The Walt Disney Co. has earned credibility with diehard fans by keeping its fingerprints off important film franchises like those produced by its Marvel Entertainment and Pixar divisions.

"They've been pretty clearly hands-off in terms of letting the creative minds of those companies do what they do best," says Todd Juenger, an analyst with Bernstein Research. "Universally, people think they pulled it off."

Though the Walt Disney Co. built its reputation on squeaky clean family entertainment, its brand today is multifaceted. Disney, of course, started as an animation studio in 1923 with characters such as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse. Over the years, the company ventured into live action movies, opened theme parks, launched a fleet of cruise ships and debuted shows on TV.

By way of acquisitions over the last few decades, it has ballooned into a company with $40.9 billion in annual revenue and a market value of $88 billion. Disney bought Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 for $19 billion, Pixar for $7.4 billion in 2006, Marvel for $4.2 billion in 2009 and this week, it said it will purchase Lucasfilm and the "Star Wars" franchise for $4.05 billion.

Disney's acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009 offers the best example of how it might treat Lucasfilm and the "Star Wars" universe.

Marvel was in the midst of a storyline that would span several films following the smash hit success of its first self-produced movie, "Iron Man," in 2008. When Disney bought it a year later, it continued reading from the comic book giant's playbook, releasing in subsequent years "Iron Man 2," ''Thor," ''Captain America" and then this year, "The Avengers," which brought heroes from those movies together in one giant film that grossed $1.5 billion at the box office.

Now, "Avengers" director Joss Whedon is working on the sequel and developing a Marvel-based TV series for Disney-owned ABC.

Rick Marshall, a journalist and blogger who writes about the comic book and movie industries, was skeptical when Disney bought Marvel. But his doubts quickly melted when it was clear Disney wouldn't taint the Marvel universe by getting too involved.

"I was the first one to say there's going to be a Goofy-Wolverine crossover," Marshall said. "We haven't seen that... Disney was able to step away."

Recent history ought to assuage "Star Wars" fans who fear the Disney empire. But that hasn't stopped many of them from posting an array of video and pictorial mash-ups and jokes online as they poke fun at their darkest fears: Luke Skywalker staring into the distance at a mouse-eared sun and Darth Vader telling Donald Duck that he's his father.

What Disney did with Marvel was merely amplify its presence in theme parks, stores and theaters, observers say.

Disney's formula for success with Marvel was not to tamper with storylines, but to bring the existing franchise under its corporate umbrella.

Before it was acquired, Marvel paid Paramount Pictures a percentage of movie ticket sales to advertise its movies, make film prints and get them into theaters. Disney has those capabilities, so now that money doesn't go out the door. Disney also has a worldwide network of staff that help put Marvel toys on store shelves, expanding their reach and saving the money that Marvel used to pay third-party merchandise middlemen.

Owning Marvel also gives Disney a steady flow of super hero cartoons for its pay TV channel, Disney XD. These kind of logistical savings allow Disney to profit from ownership while not interfering in the creative process.

"Marvel does seem like it's running pretty independently and staying pretty close to its roots," said Janney Capital Markets analyst Tony Wible.

Disney's recent acquisitions have also filled gaps in its creative portfolio. CEO Bob Iger has said the company's $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar in 2006 was partly an investment in talent and a way to "grow and improve Disney animation." The deal brought John Lasseter, a former Disneyland employee, back into the fold as its chief creative officer of both Disney and Pixar's animation studios.

The purchase of Marvel helped Disney add characters that would resonate with boys at a time when the company was becoming known more for princesses, fairies and its fictional teenage rock star Hannah Montana.

The "Star Wars" franchise fills a hole in Disney's live-action portfolio, which suffered an embarrassing $200 million loss on the sci-fi flick "John Carter" earlier this year. The box-office bomb caused an executive shuffle at the studio that brought in former Warner Bros. president Alan Horn, who oversaw the hugely successful runs of "Harry Potter" and "The Dark Knight" movies.

It's in Disney's best interest to maintain the integrity of film franchises that come with a built-in fan base. Disney chief Iger has said the plan is for "Star Wars" live-action movies to replace others that may be in development, and to keep its production slate at a modest 7 to 10 movies per year.

"I think Disney's intention is that it just doesn't want to get in the way of a great asset," said Morningstar analyst Michael Corty.

In a conference call explaining the acquisition, Iger told analysts that "Disney respects and understands, probably better than just about anyone else, the importance of iconic characters and what it takes to protect and leverage them effectively."

When "Star Wars Episode 7" hits theaters in 2015, millions of fans will surely hold Iger to his word.

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First Mention: First Mention: Monoclonal Antibodies in The New York Times

The theoretical work that would lead to the production of monoclonal antibodies started in the early 1970s, but The New York Times would not mention the term until May 1, 1979, in a roundup of science news. “A new San Diego firm,” an article on Page C2 said, “plans to manufacture and sell antibodies produced artificially by tissue-culture techniques.”

Antibodies circulate in the body until latching on to foreign cells, called antigens, which they destroy. Monoclonal antibodies are manufactured in the laboratory and then cloned, producing custom-designed and uniform antibodies that can attach to specific disease cells — bacteria, viruses or cancer cells — without injuring healthy tissue.

By the late 1970s, several new biotechnology companies, including Genentech and Hybritech, had already concluded that drugs made with monoclonal antibodies might be used to treat cancer and other diseases. On Jan. 27, 1980, in a front-page article headed “Advances in Gene Splicing Hint Scientific-Industrial Revolution,” Harold M. Schmeck Jr., took note of the dizzying speed at which the field was progressing. But he may have been somewhat too optimistic in predicting that “these feats of biological alchemy may be only spectacular curtain raisers for a new scientific-industrial revolution.”

On Aug. 18, 1984, Stuart Diamond would report in an article on Page 31 that “a biotechnology research company says it has produced the first commercial levels of human monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of disease.”

The Times announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Page 1 on Oct. 16, 1984. The headline read “3 Immunology Investigators Win the Nobel Prize in Medicine,” and on the same day the paper published two other articles on the winners, along with an editorial by Nicholas Wade titled “Triumph of an ‘Unworkable’ Idea.”

Dr. Niels K. Jerne, who laid the theoretical groundwork, and Dr. George J. F. Köhler and Dr. César Milstein, who produced the first monoclonal antibodies, shared the prize. Yet it would be more than a decade before the first monoclonal antibody drug for use in humans would come to market.

On May 1, 1997, The Times reported that Genentech and Idec Pharmaceuticals had filed for Food and Drug Administration approval of Rituximab, for the treatment of a specific form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system. In clinical trials, the drug appeared to shrink tumors in about half the patients who took it. Rituximab is used today to treat not only non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but also chronic lymphocytic leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases.

While none has proved to be a “magic bullet” for curing any disease, there are now dozens of monoclonal antibody drugs approved for diagnosis or treatment of various diseases, and hundreds more in development. 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2012

An earlier version of this article omitted a company that filed for Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug Rituximab. Idec Pharmaceuticals and Genentech jointly sought approval of Rituximab; it was not developed solely by Genentech.

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For Builders, the Storm Is Good for Business

Bad news for hurricane-ravaged homeowners is good news for at least one contingent: construction companies and the army of workers they plan to hire, many of whom have been idled and ailing from the housing bust for nearly half a decade.

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Residents checked storm damage to a home in Lindenhurst, N.Y., on Wednesday. Customers are flooding construction companies with calls for help to pluck branches out of windows, suck water from basements and livings rooms, and rebuild damaged roofs and homes. More Photos »

Two days into the destruction from Hurricane Sandy, phones were ringing nonstop at Garden State Public Adjusters in Marlton, N.J., ProStar Residential Disaster Cleanup in Milford, Conn., and other businesses along the Eastern Seaboard. Construction crews cannot get into many of the affected areas yet, because of flooded streets, detours and debris. Even so, customers were lining up, begging for help to pluck branches out of windows, suck water from basements and living rooms, and rebuild damaged roofs and homes.

It is an exercise many contractors had been through before.

“I always look forward to a natural disaster,” said Doug Palmieri, owner of Palmieri Construction in Middlefield, Conn. “The last two storms we had around here, the snow we had included, helped out the contracting business quite a bit.”

Construction companies and insurance adjusters that are newer or less known have begun circling waterlogged neighborhoods in their cars and trucks and distributing fliers, handshakes and condolences.

“I drove around with my truck and a couple people stopped me and asked me for a business card,” said Mayara Goncalves, owner of Queiroga Construction in Bridgeport, Conn. “Unfortunately for everyone else, it’s going to be good for us.”

The five-person Queiroga Construction is hoping to meet demand with longer hours and subcontractors. Many construction companies along the East Coast, though, say they expect to hire, although the magnitude of the work and the number of additional laborers are still to be determined.

“There is going to be so much manpower required, and we are already spread so thin,” said Bill O’Connell, president of Elite Public Adjusters, which runs both an insurance adjustment company and a restoration and construction business in North Wildwood, N.J. He expects at least a million dollars of work from this storm. “I’m a little worried about being overwhelmed. The phones are ringing off the hook and we won’t be able to get to a lot of people.”

Some companies expressed concern about finding enough workers quickly, given that the slowdown in construction over the last few years has caused workers to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

“Over the course of the recession, 60 to 75 percent of construction workers left the area because there was no work to keep them busy,” said Pat Broom, owner of Phoenix Restoration, a 15-year-old company in Kill Devil Hills, N.C., on the Outer Banks. “That’s the first thing we worried about this morning when we got in: Where do we get the people?”

Even in areas where people are desperate for work, some companies say they have trouble finding workers with the skills and motivation for hard physical labor.

“The challenge is going to be finding help,” said John Scotti of Scotti Brothers Custom Home Renovation in Cumberland County, N.J. “The phone doesn’t stop ringing with people looking for jobs, and then you bring them in and they don’t want to work. The only ones that want to work are those who are here illegally.”

Businesses are hoping that the burst of construction work will draw back workers to their areas. Last year, the rebuilding efforts from Hurricane Irene attracted construction workers and insurance adjusters from as far away as Texas.

So far, though, companies said they have been inundated with more calls for work than job applicants. Some expect workers to start flowing into affected areas later this week when transportation returns to normal.

While some pleas for service are coming in steadily and urgently, it will probably take awhile for the bulk of the construction jobs to get going in earnest.

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State-by-State Guide

A look at the devastation caused in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy from North Carolina to New England.

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Hurricane Sandy disrupts Northeast U.S. telecom networks

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Power outages and flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy disrupted telecommunications services in Northeastern states on Tuesday, resulting in spotty coverage for cellphones, television, home telephones and Internet services.

While all the region's telecom service providers were having problems, Verizon Communications, which serves many of the states in the hurricane's path, may have suffered some of the worst damage from the storm to its wireline network.

About 25 percent of the region's wireless cell towers were out of action after the storm and some 911 emergency call centers were not working, according to Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

"Our assumption is that communications outages could get worse before they get better," Genachowski told reporters on a conference call, noting that the storm had not ended.

Also power outages could disrupt more cell sites if they run out of back-up power before commercial electricity services are up and running again.

People lined up at pay-phones in at least one New York neighborhood, the Lower East Side, today as their phones had either lost coverage or they had run out of battery power because there was nowhere to charge their phones in the neighborhood which had lost commercial power.

New York-based Verizon said the storm caused flooding at three Verizon central offices that hold telecom equipment in Lower Manhattan as well as sites in Queens and Long Island.

Its downtown headquarters, which was put out of action 11 years ago by the September 11 attacks, had three feet of water in the lobby at one point. Because of flooding, all its telecom equipment at that office, which serves much of Wall Street and downtown consumers, was knocked out of service.

The company said it was working on pumping out the water in the hope that it could restart its back-up power generators in the facility as commercial power services were not yet restored the morning after the big storm hit.

"The bullseye of the impact is the metro area," said spokesman William Kula, adding that restoring service for the city's financial district was a top priority for Verizon.

Telecom disruptions affect electronic trading as well as corporate operators. The chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange, which is expected to open Wednesday, said "lots of telecom infrastructure is down" and that the NYSE was working with big firms to ensure they were doing testing of their systems.

Verizon did not give an estimate as to how many businesses and consumers were affected. Two of three Manhattan central offices were partially flooded and operating minimal services.

Customers served by the damaged central offices will experience "a loss of all services" including TV, Internet, and traditional telephone services, Kula said. Some customers may experience intermittent busy signals for non-emergency calls.

Verizon said its engineers were working on assessing the damage from the early hours. Outside of New York, the company warned that it was also having some trouble.

"Verizon is discovering that many poles and power lines/Verizon cables are down throughout the region due to heavy winds and falling trees," the company said in a statement.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA said they were dealing with wireless service problems in the hurricane region. Cable operators Cablevision Systems Corp, Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable also said they were having service problems.

"I think everybody's equipment's going to be damaged, including cellphone towers," Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King said from his Verizon Wireless cellphone in Baltimore.

"Particularly for Verizon, they're clearly going to have the most damage on the wireline side because its pretty much all of their territory (where the storm hit)," King said.

Sprint Nextel, the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider said it was seeing outages at some cell sites because of the power outages across all the states in Sandy's path including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, North Virginia and New England.

"(Repair crews) have started on some critical areas but they haven't been able to get to everywhere they need to be," spokeswoman Crystal Davis said. She noted that 80 of the company's stores would reopen at noon. Sprint had closed about 180 stores ahead of the storm.

T-Mobile USA said that "customers may be experiencing service disruptions or an inability to access service in some areas, especially those that were hardest hit by the storm."

People complained of outages to their cable telephone, Internet and television services from providers including Comcast, Cablevision and Verizon in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York.

Cablevision said it was experiencing widespread service interruptions primarily related to loss of power. The company said it is working to restore services.

Comcast, whose headquarters is in Philadelphia and serves East Coast states, said that for the majority of customers, "Comcast service should be restored as power comes back on to their homes."

Cellphone service was spotty for top wireless providers Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, according to some customers.

Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group, said on Tuesday afternoon that customers may be experiencing service issues and that about 94 percent of its cell sites were up and running.

AT&T said it was experiencing some issues in areas heavily affected by the storm. By Tuesday morning, spokesman Mark Siegel said AT&T was in the initial stages of on-the-ground assessment and that it expected "crews will be working around the clock to restore service."

Several Time Warner Cable customers in Brooklyn said that their Internet, television and phone services stopped working Monday night but were back again by Tuesday morning.

Time Warner Cable said that while it has not seen any major damage to its infrastructure, its customers who do not have electricity do not have cable services.

Millions of people in the eastern United States awoke on Tuesday to flooded homes, fallen trees and widespread power outages caused by Sandy, which swamped New York City's subway system and submerged streets in Manhattan's financial district.

At least 30 people were reported killed in the United States by one of the biggest storms to ever hit the country. Sandy dropped just below hurricane status before making landfall on Monday night in New Jersey.

(Additional reporting by Jennifer Saba, Liana Baker, Katya Wachtel in New York, Dian Bartz in Washington DC and many other Reuters reporters around the hurricane region; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)

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Disney to make new 'Star Wars' films, buy Lucas co

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A decade since George Lucas said "Star Wars" was finished on the big screen, a new trilogy under new ownership is destined for theaters after The Walt Disney Co. announced Tuesday that it was buying Lucasfilm Ltd. from him for $4.05 billion.

The seventh movie, with a working title of "Episode 7," is set for release in 2015. Episodes 8 and 9 will follow. The trilogy will continue the story of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia beyond "Return of the Jedi," the third film released and the sixth in the saga. After that, Disney plans a new "Star Wars" movie every two or three years. Lucas will serve as creative consultant in the new movies.

"I'm doing this so that the films will have a longer life," Lucas, the 68-year-old creator of the series and sole owner of Lucasfilm, said in an interview posted on YouTube. "I get to be a fan now ... I sort of look forward to it. It's a lot more fun actually, than actually having to go out into the mud and snow."

Disney CEO Bob Iger said Lucasfilm had already developed an extensive story line on the next trilogy, and Episode 7 was now in early-stage development. He said he talked with Lucas about buying the company from him a year and a half ago, but they didn't decide on a deal until very recently as Lucas set in motion his retirement.

"The last 'Star Wars' movie release was 2005's 'Revenge of the Sith' — and we believe there's substantial pent-up demand," Iger said.

The blockbuster deal announced Tuesday will see Disney pay half the acquisition price in cash and half in newly issued stock. The company expects it to add to earnings in 2015. Along with the cash, Lucas will end up owning about 40 million Disney shares, which is about a 2.2 percent stake of the 1.83 billion shares that will be in circulation when the transaction closes.

The deal includes Lucasfilm's prized high-tech production companies, Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, as well as rights to the "Indiana Jones" franchise.

Lucas was hailed as a cinematic visionary when the original "Star Wars" came out in 1977. But he had become an object of often-vicious ridicule by the time he released 3-D versions of all six films in the Star Wars franchise earlier this year.

Die-hard Star War fans had been vilifying Lucas for years, convinced that he had become a commercial sell-out and had compounded his sins by desecrating the heroic tale that he originally sought to tell.

They railed against him for adding grating characters such as Jar Jar Binks in the second trilogy and attacked him for tinkering with the original trilogy, too. Any revision in special edition or home video releases — such as making the Ewoks blink or having a green-skinned alien named Greedo take the first shot at Han Solo in a famous bar scene — were treated as blasphemy.

The criticism grated on Lucas, who vowed never to make another Star Wars movie.

"Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?" Lucas told The New York Times earlier this year.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the fourth film in another lucrative franchise, subjected Lucas to even more barbs when it came to the big screen in 2008. Fans of those films were especially outraged about an opening scene that featured Indiana Jones crawling into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive a nuclear bomb blasting.

Lucas was fed up by the time he released "Red Tails," a movie depicting the valor of African-American pilots during World War II, earlier this year. He told the Times he was ready to retire from the business of making blockbusters and return to his roots as a student at USC's film school, where he once made a movie about clouds moving in a desert.

Kathleen Kennedy, the current co-chairman of Lucasfilm, will become the division's president and report to Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn. She will serve as executive producer for the new movies. Directors for the new movies have not yet been announced.

In the YouTube video, Lucas said the decision to continue with the saga wasn't inconsistent with past statements.

"I always said I wasn't going to do any more and that's true, because I'm not going to do any more, but that doesn't mean I'm unwilling to turn it over to Kathy to do more," Lucas said.

He said he has given Kennedy his story lines and other ideas, "and I have complete confidence that she's going to take them and make great movies."

Kennedy added that she and Lucas had discussed ideas with a couple of writers about the future movies and said Lucas would continue to have a key advisory role. "My Yoda has to be there," she said.

The deal brings Lucasfilm under the Disney banner with other brands including Pixar, Marvel, ESPN and ABC, all companies that Disney has acquired over the years.

A former weatherman who rose through the ranks of ABC, Iger has orchestrated some of the company's biggest acquisitions, including the $7.4 billion purchase of animated movie studio Pixar in 2006 and the $4.2 billion acquisition of comic book giant Marvel in 2009.

Coincidentally, Lucas owned the startup that later became Pixar, before he sold it to Apple's Steve Jobs in 1986 for about $5 million. When Jobs sold Pixar to Disney, he became Disney's largest single shareholder with a 7.7 percent stake. Those shares are now held in a trust.

Disney shares were not trading with stock markets closed due to the impact of Superstorm Sandy in New York. They closed on Friday at $50.08.

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AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this story.

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Sports of The Times: With No One Looking, Mental Illness in Athletes Can Stay Hidden

We’ve seen it hundreds of times. An athlete is injured and within seconds is surrounded by an armada of medical personnel: trainers, assistant trainers, team doctors. The athlete is helped off the field, given a diagnosis, treated and sent to physical therapy, often to return miraculously in a week or two.

Jim Sulley/Associated Press

Luther Wright at the 1993 Big East tournament, when he played for Seton Hall. He was later treated for mental illness.

Patrick Murphy-Racey for The New York Times

The former W.N.B.A. star Chamique Holdsclaw has spoken of her fight with depression.

But when that same athlete has a mental disorder, there is no armada of trainers, no team doctors. That athlete is often abandoned. For all of the current focus on traumatic brain injury as a result of concussions, mental illness, often overlooked, exists at every level of sports.

Sports too often is a masking agent that hides deeply rooted mental health issues. The better the athlete, the more desperate to reach the next level, the less likely he or she will reach out for help. The gladiator mentality remains a primary barrier.

“Mental health has a stigma that is tied into weakness and is absolutely the antithesis of what athletes want to portray,” said Dr. Thelma Dye Holmes, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, one of New York’s oldest mental health agencies, serving more than 1,500 children and their families.

“Mental health is not something that you can easily know,” Holmes said. “You feel a pain in your side, you have discomfort. Mental illness is vague and makes us uneasy. Especially when it comes to athletes, there tends to be a stigma around coming forward.”

Holmes was among a group of health care professionals and former professional athletes who met recently at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York to discuss the problem of mental health and mental illness in athletes. The gathering was part of a series of salons initiated by Schomburg’s director, Khalil Muhammad, to explore the relationship between sports and the African-American community.   But mental illness knows neither race nor ethnicity, and at a time when brain trauma has become front and center of a national conversation about safety in sports, mental illness is the silent spike of the sports industry. Asking for help is looked upon as a weakness in a community in which coaches preach mental toughness.

“They believe nothing can go wrong, they don’t need help, they can overcome,” Dr. Ira Glick, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, said in a telephone interview.

He added: “And just for that alone, they don’t want to go to therapy either for psychotherapy or medication. You have to start to change the culture beginning in Little League, imbue in them from the time they are Little League players.”

There is, of course, a related issue: confidentiality. Whom can a player trust?

“Players want to have somebody to talk to, but they don’t want their teammates or the team to find out because of the stigma and they’re afraid of being dropped,” Glick said.

Luther Wright can attest to that. He was a high school star in New Jersey, attended Seton Hall, then was a first-round pick of the Utah Jazz.

Wright published an intriguing memoir — “A Perfect Fit” — that chronicled his journey from the celebrity of being the largest baby born in New Jersey that year to stardom in high school and college, to a season in the N.B.A., to drug and alcohol abuse and, finally, to a diagnosis of mental illness.

According to Wright, who attended the conference, an athlete desperate to provide for his family — and to reach the professional level — may not feel he has the luxury to divulge, much less explore, a mental health issue.

“You can’t get sick,” Wright said. “At the college level, that’s your proving ground. There’s no room for any type of diagnosis for mental health issues because that would put up a red flag and maybe block you from going to the next level.

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Media Decoder Blog: Disney Buying Lucasfilm for $4 Billion

5:03 p.m. | Updated LOS ANGELES — The Walt Disney Company, in a move that gives it a commanding position in the realm of fantasy movies, said Tuesday it had agreed to acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash.

The sale provides a corporate home for a private company that grew from Mr. Lucas’s hugely successful “Star Wars” series, and became an enduring force in creating effects-driven science fiction entertainment for large and small screens. Mr. Lucas, who is 68 years old, had already announced he would step down from day-to-day operation of the company.

In a hastily convened conference call with investors Tuesday afternoon, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said the company plans to release a seventh “Star Wars” feature film in 2015, with new films in the series coming every two or three years after that. Mr. Lucas will be a consultant on the film projects, Mr. Iger said.

Combined with the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009 and of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, the acquisition will help secure the legacy of Mr. Iger as a builder who aggressively expanded the company since taking charge in 2005. Mr. Iger is set to step down as chief executive in March of 2015, but will remain with Disney in a lesser role under an employment deal he reached with Disney last year.

“Lucasfilm reflects the extraordinary passion, vision, and storytelling of its founder, George Lucas,” Mr. Iger said in a statement.

Jay Rasulo, the company’s chief financial officer, said Disney’s financial calculations in agreeing to the purchase Lucasfilm were driven almost entirely by the potential of the “Star Wars” series, which already has a place in the Disney theme parks. Mr. Rasulo said Lucasfilm’s licensing revenue comes mostly from toys and heavily from North America. Disney, he said, is positioned to extend the licensing business to other products and to strengthen it internationally.

Mr. Rasulo said Disney expects within two years to repurchase the shares it is issuing to fund the purchase. Lucasfilms, he said, should begin boosting Disney’s earnings by 2015.

The companies said Disney would pay approximately half of the purchase price in cash, and would issue about 40 million shares to cover the balance when the deal closes.

With the acquisition, Disney will acquire Lucasfilm’s live action production business, along with its Industrial Light & Magic effects business, its Skywalker Sound audio operation and its consumer products unit, among other things.

In a statement, Disney said it was particularly pleased to acquire the filmmaking technology that comes with Mr. Lucas’s company, and expects “sustained growth” from “Star Wars” and other Lucas properties as they are joined with Disney’s parks and existing entertainment and licensing businesses.

“It’s now time for me to pass ‘Star Wars’ to on to a new generation of filmmakers,” Mr. Lucas said in a statement.

Kathleen Kennedy, a long-time associate of Steven Spielberg who recently agreed to become co-chairman of LucasFilm, will now be its president, reporting to Alan F. Horn, the chairman of Disney’s movie studio.

Lucasfilm is based in San Francisco, and now, in combination with Pixar — which operates from across the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville — it gives Disney, which is based in Burbank, a major presence in Northern California.

Among its operations, Lucasfilm owns Lucasfilm Singapore, a digital animation company, and Lucas Online, which creates Web content.

Along with “Star Wars” and its many iterations on movie screens, in television programming, in video games and elsewhere, Mr. Lucas has been a partner in the “Indiana Jones” series, and, occasionally, in an unrelated film, like “Willow.” After the release of the first “Star Wars” film in 1977, Mr. Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic took the lead in developing effects technologies that were used in a generation of science fiction and fantasy films. Eventually, other companies, including Weta Digital, a New Zealand company co-owned by Peter Jackson, challenged its primacy, but never really supplanted it.

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Hurricane Sandy Predicted to Bring ‘Life-Threatening’ Surge

Hurricane Sandy battered the mid-Atlantic region on Monday, its powerful gusts and storm surges causing once-in-a-generation flooding in coastal communities, knocking down trees and power lines and leaving more than 100,000 people in the rain-soaked dark.

The enormous and merciless storm unexpectedly picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on a slate-gray day and went on to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shorefront neighborhoods into ghost towns. Even the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty left to ride out the storm at his mother’s house in New Jersey; he said the statue itself was “high and dry,” but his house in the shadow of the torch was not.

The wind-driven rain lashed sea walls and protective barriers in places like Atlantic City, where the Boardwalk was damaged as water forced its way inland. Foam was spitting, and the sand gave in to the waves along the beach at Sandy Hook, N.J., at the entrance to New York Harbor. Water was thigh-high on the streets in Sea Bright, N.J., a three-mile sand-sliver of a town where the ocean joined the Shrewsbury River.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said David Arnold, watching the storm from his longtime home in Long Branch, N.J. “The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”

In Queens, shortly after 7 p.m., a tree fell on a house, killing a 30-year-old man, the police said. In Manhattan, where the National Weather Service measured gusts of 54 miles per hour at 2 p.m., a construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in the city came loose and dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall.

Water topped the sea wall in the financial district, sending cars floating in the rushing water.

“We could be fishing out our windows tomorrow,” said Garnett Wilcher, a barber who lives in the Hammells Houses, a block from the ocean in the Rockaways in Queens. Still, he said he felt safe at home. Pointing to neighboring apartment houses in the city-run housing project, he said, “We got these buildings for jetties.”Hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds spread out 485 miles from the center. Forecasters said tropical-storm-force winds could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes. Snow was expected in some states, with blizzard warnings issued for mountainous stretches of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

Businesses and schools were closed; roads, bridges and tunnels were closed; and more than 13,000 airline flights were canceled. Even the Erie Canal was shut down.

Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines. About 1,000 flights were canceled at each of the three major airports in the New York City area. Philadelphia International Airport had 1,200 canceled flights, according to FlightAware, a data provider in Houston.

A replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, a tall ship built for the 1962 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” starring Marlon Brando and used in the recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, sank off the North Carolina coast. The Coast Guard said the 180-foot three-masted ship went down near the Outer Banks after being battered by 18-foot-high seas and thrashed by 40-m.p.h. winds. The body of one crew member, Claudene Christian, 42, was recovered. Another crew member remained missing.

Delaware banned cars and trucks from state roadways for other than “essential personnel.”

“The most important thing right now is for people to use common sense,” Gov. Jack Markell said. “We didn’t want people out on the road going to work and not being able to get home again.”

The storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, stores and office buildings. Consolidated Edison said 68,700 customers had lost power — 21,800 in Westchester County, 18,500 on Staten Island and 18,200 in Queens. In New Jersey, the Public Service Electric and Gas Company said the storm had knocked out power to 36,000 customers. In Connecticut, nearly 70,000 people had lost electricity, utility officials reported. Con Edison, fearing damage to its electrical equipment, shut down power pre-emptively in sections of Lower Manhattan.

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Apple software, retail chiefs out in sweeping overhaul

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook on Monday replaced the heads of its software and retail units in the company's most sweeping executive shake-up in a decade following embarrassing problems with its new mapping program and unpopular store-related decisions.

Software chief Scott Forstall, who oversaw the launch of the flawed mapping software and much criticized Siri voice-enabled assistant, will leave Apple next year and serve as an advisor to Cook in the meantime.

Forstall, seen as a polarizing figure inside Apple, had been billed as one of the future candidates to take the top job at Apple. He was the executive behind the panned Apple Maps app that the company announced with much fanfare in summer.

The moves, which come a little more than a year into Cook's tenure as CEO, were described by Apple as a way to increase "collaboration" across its hardware, software and services business.

"These changes show that Tim Cook is stamping his authority on the business," Ben Wood, analyst with CCS Insight, said. "Perhaps disappointed with the Maps issues, Forstall became the scapegoat."

Critics of the maps debacle, which led Cook to apologize to customers, had been calling for Forstall's head. "Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?" Fortune editor Philip Elmer Dewitt wrote on Sept 29.

The moves hand over substantially more responsibility to Cue, the head of Internet Software and Services who helped create the iTunes music store and App Store. The 23-year Apple veteran already is in charge of Cloud services and will take on Apple Maps and Siri.

Apple said a search is underway for a new retail chief to replace John Browett and that the retail team would report directly to Cook. Browett had riled up the retail store staff when he decided to reduce the number of retail employees.

Browett took over as head of Apple's retail stores earlier this year, replacing Ron Johnson, who went on to become the CEO of JC Penney.

Last week Apple delivered a second straight quarter of disappointing financial results, and iPad sales fell short of Wall Street's targets, marring its record of consistently blowing past investors' expectations.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang)

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