It's probably a good thing, mainly because Lucas has become such a talentless hack. His Star Wars the Clone Wars animated series has been pretty good actually, except when his daughter did the writing for a season which completely sucked. Otherwise his reworking of the first (third) movie was horrific, and all the movies after the first two were likewise horror shows.
Pretty much. Those who have licensed the properties have done pretty well... especialy in the computer game arena. I've long felt like the torch was best picked up by SWKOTOR 1&2. Even their animated cut-scenes were better acted and directed than the prequels.
Disney is probably a good choice
I would just go by Disney's track record with Marvel, which elevated superhero movie quality from that publisher and had some long-term planning resulting in The Avengers. It remains to be seen what will occur with Pixar, since Pixar was BETTER than Disney (IMO) and I feel like I've seen a slight decline in some of their offerings (like Brave) as well as producing a movie like Cars 2.
As long as they can keep some edge to it the new movies might be pretty good.
Edge would be nice. They can make movies more dramatically interesting without losing PG or PG-13 status.
Now why don't they do that with Star Trek? The franchise needs a reboot on TV.
The movie reboot was great, although the upcoming one will clarify whether it just came nicely out of the blocks or doesn't have the strength to keep running so well.
The big problem with Trek IMO was the sheer glut of it -- at one point, I think there were three separate Trek series airing new episodes at one time, and I just couldn't keep up with them, so I bailed on everything. (Plus our kids were very young, so regular TV show viewing kind of went out the window for awhile.) I saw all of TNG, missed almost all of DSN, saw a season of Voyager, and then quit without ever seeing Enterprise.
I think, though, they would need to recreate the concepts. I don't know what Enterprise was like, but Voyager and TNG were very much this happy little series -- very formulaic, endings seem to reach a particular type of closure.
I was very much reminded of TNG when I watched Terra Nova and now episodes of Revolutions this season, but the reason is that TV and the TV audience has somewhat changed -- they want more depth, some ongoing plot interest, etc. I wanted to like Terra Nova very much, but it just kind of left me ill, everything felt too neatly packaged without a lot of compelling conflict... and Revolutions is leaving me the same way. The writing isn't as strong, dramatically.
I think Once Upon a Time is geared towards a younger audience as well and have kind of navigated in that old style, but the longer show arcs and twists have saved it at least through Season 2.
