CARRY ON

A correspondent from Forbes magazine was at a Disney event last weekend.

The report was from Disney's D23 Expo. This is the Disney-centric expo version of comic-cons.

At the show, visitors got to see glimpses of new materials from  Pixar, Disney Animation, Marvel Studios, and some of the upcoming live-action tent poles. Some stars made appearances, like Angelina Jolie, to plug her next movie,  Maleficent, in which she plays the Sleeping Beauty villain in a film told from her point of view. 

But the reporters' big news item from the expo was on  J.J. Abrams’s upcoming summer 2015 tent pole Star Wars Episode 7.  Visitors learned absolutely nothing about Star Wars Episode 7.
 
There was no title announcement, no casting confirmations, no teaser posters, nor any major acknowledgment behind ‘Yes, J.J. Abrams is still directing’ and “summer 2015′ is still the goal. 

How refreshing. No spoilers. No news. Nothing.

It was a shock to the fanboy collective when Lucas sold his bounty to Disney. Disney is in the "franchise" business and Star Wars is an iconic franchise. The reboot has the entertainment industry on pins and needles. (Especially this summer when Hollywood' had a record number of blockbuster box office busts.)

There are two camps in regard to Abrams, the movie director. Younger audiences tend to like his Star Trek reboot. Older, original die hard Trek fans do not care for the Abrams version of the franchise. It overwrote much of the canon elements of the original series. So there is some unease when Abrams was tapped to make the seventh Star Wars installment.

In retrospect, there were very few spoilers in the LOST saga, in part due to its long story format and its disjointed segment sequences (flashbacks/real time/flash forwards) and its inability to answer deep questions without raising more mysteries. For example, even today, no one can definitively say what the smoke monster was, or what it truly represented.