George Lucas: Days of the big picture are over

George Lucas, the pioneering filmmaker who created “Star Wars” and the subsequent motion picture franchise, said his company, Lucasfilm, was now moving away from the movie business.

Making major feature films today is too expensive and risky, Lucas told “Daily Variety” last week in Los Angeles at the groundbreaking ceremony for the renamed School of Cinematic Arts at USC.

Lucas said that he believed that Americans were abandoning the movie-going habit for good, and that the future of entertainment media was going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable.

In the near future, Lucasfilm, he said, will mostly pursue smaller scale projects, much of it for television. His company, he insisted, is not yet ready to become an Internet distributor.