Alan Dean Foster was about 20 years old when George Lucas, next to a model of the Millennium Falcon in a warehouse in Southern California, met him to talk about the adaptation of the new movie “Star Wars” .
The original contract provided for an initial payment of $ 7,500, until Mr. Lucas threw Mr. Foster a 0.5% royalty for sales that Mr. Foster, now 74, says he added that payment several times. initial. They arrived several times a year, as the original blockbuster of 1977 set box office records and the novelization he wrote sold more than a million copies.
Then, in 2012, Walt Disney Co. bought Lucasfilm Ltd. and copyright controls were stopped.
Now, Mr. Foster and other Disney-acquired franchise authors are in a heated dispute with Hollywood’s largest empire, which they say refuses to pay royalties from the book contracts it absorbed in the 4,000-member Lucasfilm deal. millions of dollars and other acquisitions. The amount of money at stake is minuscule for a Disney-sized company, but important for writers looking for it. Although Disney has exploited Lucasfilm for new films that have collectively grossed nearly $ 6 billion at the box office worldwide, these writers say the company has delayed the processing of its complaints and reaffirmed them in checks. which rarely add up to a few thousand dollars.
Since the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Association made Mr. Foster’s dispute public, other authors of books related to Indiana Jones’ projects in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” have presented similar stories of royalty checks that are gone. stop after Disney acquired the properties. In both cases, Disney threatens to alienate an obscure but vital tentacle from the franchises, as these novels helped build loyalty and retain fans. Complicated matters: The exact amount of money at stake is unknown, as sales and copyrights of the books involved have fluctuated enormously over time.
A Disney spokesman said: “We are carefully reviewing whether any royalty payments may have been lost as a result of the integration of the acquisition and we will take appropriate corrective action if necessary.”
Mr. Foster, who is well known to former Star Wars fans, says Disney ignores job players who help build intergenerational connections with beloved characters. He and his wife are in poor health and said the royalty revenue could be useful for medical expenses.
“I’m not Steve Spielberg. I’m not Steve King. I don’t even have a name that starts with Steve,” he said.
The dispute began in the summer of 2019, when Mr. Foster’s literary agent, Vaughne Hansen, first asked Disney why he had stopped receiving copyright checks on three novels he had written linked to. in “Alien,” the outer space horror series produced by Twentieth. Century Fox, the studio that Disney bought as part of a $ 71.3 billion deal in 2019.
Then Mr. Foster and his agent realized that the same thing had happened to the copyright for two Star Wars books after Disney bought Lucasfilm.
In response to questions about the “Alien” checks, a Disney attorney told Mr. Foster that the company had acquired the rights to those books, but not the obligations to pay royalties. But in the case of “Alien,” Ms. Hansen said, the rights to Mr. Foster’s novels had been reallocated several times, without interruption of copyright controls, before Disney bought Fox.
“Disney has bought a house with a mortgage. They want to keep living in the house. They don’t want to pay the mortgage,” Foster said.
The group of writers claims that a similar pattern has emerged after other Disney acquisitions. Since then, at least half a dozen writers from various Disney properties said they were on the same ship, said Mary Robinette Kowal, president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Disney has begun reviewing the “Alien” case, but there is a line of writers behind Mr. Foster waiting for a turn at the negotiating table. In all, Ms. Hansen estimates that her client had earned more than $ 50,000 in royalties just with the original Star Wars novel before the controls stopped in 2012.
If Disney agrees to calculate the missing rights, it faces a daunting task of tracking sales that span six years and, only in the case of Mr. Foster, five novels published in dozens of international markets.
Donald Glut, a writer who novelized “The Empire Strikes Back” in the 1980s, and James Kahn, who adapted the third film in the original trilogy, “The Return of the Jedi,” both have said that copyright controls are missing.
If a resolution is not reached, the writers association could take additional action, Ms. Kowal said, including including Disney on a list of editors telling its members to avoid it. The term given to this designation: “Writer Be careful.”
Write to Erich Schwartzel at [email protected]