Credit: LucasfilmMike Blanchard has announced his departure from Lucasfilm after nearly 30 years at the studio.
Blanchard – who first joined Lucasfilm in 1995 to create feature-length versions of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for home video – will retire from his position of Vice President of Post Production this month.
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During his time at Lucasfilm, Blanchard worked on the Star Wars Special Edition (1997) releases and the Star Wars prequel trilogy alongside George Lucas himself. In the announcement of his departure on the Lucasfilm website, he described his dedication to Lucas, who famously sold the studio to The Walt Disney Company in 2012, claiming it was his “loyalty” that got him through his time working on the prequels.
“Don’t get me wrong. It was hard,” he said. “We had a small team. What George asked for was difficult because he was so far ahead of everything. But there was no confusion about what we were supposed to do. We had a clarity of purpose that came straight from George. We didn’t want to let him down. For me, that was it. Once we knew what he wanted, we had to do everything we could to get it done.”
Blanchard is credited with pioneering some of the technological advancements made during the Star Wars prequels. “For 2002’s Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Blanchard was instrumental in helping to bring George Lucas’ vision of a digitally-shot and projected film to life, a first for a major motion picture,” his bio reads on the Lucasfilm website. “He was intimately involved in the digital camera system and workflow for that film as well as 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, both of which were considered risky and revolutionary at the time for their full embrace of digital production.”
Much has been made of Blanchard’s departure from Lucasfilm among Star Wars fans, who view it as yet another loss of the “old guard” of the pre-Disney George Lucas era of Star Wars. As @swtorstrategies wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter): “A true end of an era for the galaxy far, far away.”
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Blanchard himself commented on the declining number of employees who’ve worked alongside Lucas at Lucasfilm and noted that he’s tried his best to maintain “Lucasfilm’s DNA” during his career.
“As the years go by, naturally there are less people in the company who worked with George,” he said. “But there’s still a reason why we’re in Northern California, and there are so many great people here who respect that. There’s a reason why George came here, and it has to do with that rebel spirit. It’s important to think about that from time to time. Why are we here? What has it taken for Lucasfilm to endure for so long and survive a crazy business over all these decades?”
As Blanchard exits Lucasfilm, Pippa Anderson remains Senior Vice President of Post-Production.
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