MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Disney is sitting on an unreleased 3D version of Star Wars: A New Hope.

Reader Jumborg Ace wrote in to ask, "Does there exist a "converted to 3D" official copy of Star Wars A New Hope that Lucasfilm (at the time) did not release or is that a myth?"

It's a fascinating question, and it really ties well into the rather interesting state that George Lucas and Lucasfilm was in when Lucas sold the company to Disney. While there had been no new movies and Lucas was not really in the middle of any concrete plans for any FUTURE movies, Lucas clearly had some rather ambitious plans for his company before selling it to Disney.

His plans just happened to involve converting the six original Star Wars films to 3D. Since they were his babies, as it were, Lucas naturally wanted to do all six of the films in order and so he decided to convert the films in his "official" order, meaning the three prequels first.

Thus he released A Phantom Menace converted to 3D to theaters in February 2012...

The plan was to have a new one each year.

Then a funny thing happened - Lucas then sold Lucasfilm to Disney in October of 2012.

While Disney currently owns Fox's movie catalog and all of their respective rights, at the time of the purchase of Lucasfilm, Fox was still its own independent company and they owned the distribution rights to the original six films. Even with Disney distributing the NEW films, Fox still continued to distribute the original ones. Thus, Disney had no interest in pursuing any 3D releases when they would have to distribute them through Fox.

Plus, they wanted to concentrate on their NEW films, like A Force Awakens.

So what about A New Hope?

There likely were SOME conversions made on A New Hope by the time that Disney canceled the project, but it was essentially not really started yet.

Lucasfilm later showed fans copies of the 3D versions of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, so we know that they were completed...

But nothing with A New Hope. It seems like the cancellation was early enough in the process that A New Hope was not fully converted yet (and might not have been converted at all).

So I don't believe that there is A New Hope version out there. Although, since Disney now owns Fox, perhaps they WILL eventually get around to doing the 3D re-releases of all of them.

The legend is..

STATUS: False

Thanks to Jumborg Ace for the suggestion!

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