Disney - Mickey Skywalker - FT.com It says something about the power of Disney in the capital markets galaxy that it can turn a $4bn blaster ray of cash and shares on an acquisition target, and its stock barely registers the news. But it is hard to declare the Lucasfilm deal cheap or expensive when most of the value of the company depends not on its current earnings power but on how well the next three Star Wars movies do at the box office. The Disney team has made comments implying that Lucasfilm will have revenues of about $860m from its films, consumer products, video games and the like in 2012. They also argued that, adjusting for 3D theatres, inflation, and globalisation, the last three Star Wars films would each have pulled in $1.5bn at the box office. That is just about exactly this summer's receipts from The Avengers, a product of Disney's last acquisition - of Marvel, also for $4bn, in 2009. Assume that the next three, to be released every three years or so starting in 2015, reach that level, and cost a higher than normal $500m each to make and market, and you are looking at $3bn in profits spread over less than a decade. Assume also that Disney turns its usual trick of growing the revenue stream from residual products, and earns margins on them comparable to its own. Plug in a few benign assumptions about inflation, discount profits for the time value of money, and it looks a lot like Disney could well earn back its investment in 10 years, and anything it can wring out of Luke, Yoda and Jabba after that is gravy. This happy narrative turns on whether it is right to extrapolate from that $1.5bn figure Disney suggested. If the Star Wars franchise is so solid that anything less than excellent box-office sales are inconceivable, Disney has done well. But if the next instalment is only a moderate success at the box office - suggesting, in turn, weak sales of toys and the rest - this deal goes straight to the dark side.