I'm almost certain that the Unity licensing debacle caused a number of Disney department heads to say "we need to make sure this doesn't sneak up on us on the Unreal side for our cinematic production pipeline." Whether or not this deal was already in the works, it certainly didn't hurt it.

That was true many years ago (that ILM used UE for the LED wall) but they switched out UE for a dedicated software tool by the second season of Mandalorian, called Helios.

Details here and elsewhere: https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecra...

Epic doesn't charge for use of Unreal Engine in vfx, and overall I don't think vfx is a very profitable space for most software companies. It's a low margin business, mostly outsourced. I doubt that Hollywood studios are going to pay any vfx provider a share of revenue in any case.

This is changing:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/5/23905082/epic-unreal-engi...

It's still not a significant source of revenue. How many per-seat licenses do you think they will sell to vfx companies, who usually operate on paper-thin margins?

Maybe but they've been wanting to get in to gaming for a while now, so this is probably mostly about that.

> get back in to gaming

FTFY. They had their own game publishing arm since 1988, Disney Interactive Studios, and owned first-party studios like Avalanche Software, which was sold off to Warner Bros.

They shut it down in 2016.

Don't forget Lucasfilm Games, nee LucasArts. They published a lot of games, both star wars properties and otherwise. They're now owned by Disney as well.

Interesting to bring this up - always wondered which way the creative influence went between Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean (if i recall correctly, the game is based off the ride, but the film was allegedly inspired by the game)

I recall the first film opening with bars of a song which also features prominently in the ride.

Apparently the song itself was written for the rides in 1967 [1] and I assume is based off even older pirate shanties. Certainly reminds me of songs from the book Treasure Island (1883).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_Ho_(A_Pirate%27s_Life_for_M...

I thought there was a book somewhere in the mix as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Stranger_Tides Wikipedia tells me the book inspired monkey island, the ride inspired both the book and monkey island, and the book inspired the fourth movie.

Eh, Lucasflim Games was pretty much shutdown in 2013 and only stuck around as a shell just to license out to, uh, checks notes EA. They're nothing like what they used to be when they enabled games like Rogue Squadron, KotOR or Jedi Academy.

Jedi Academy / KOTOR? Talk to me when you understand the wonder of Dark Forces and Outlaws. :)

Toontown Online used to be a fairly popular mmo in the 2000s. The game itself is gone but the game engine was open sourced as Panda3d (C++ with Python bindings). The project is still active too, with modern features like PBR still being added. I personally like how it's code-first (vs editor-centric like Godot), but the GUI options are really fugly and clunky.

Yeah that was my first thought. I'm sure the gaming part means something to them, but they probably think of them more as a Real Time Special Effects company.

100% this is it. Their virtual set and volume tech is unparalleled. Disney see it as the future of TV/film production.

Only for the first season. They switched to their own stuff later. IIRC.

Correct. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39296621

One would assume Pixar has enough talent to write something proprietary for Disney that integrates more of their VFX tech that UE can't do.

Yeah, I'm not sure why Disney of all companies would be so enamored by another company's entertainment IP that they'd spend $1.5B to have dibs on it. There has to be a better explanation than Fortnite skins.

Fortnite skins are probably worth more than Star Wars as a property at the moment. At least, worth far more than $1.5b.