The whole article is very fascinating. So this seems to have started a couple years ago, and Lucas went fairly far down the garden path before selling to Disney. I wonder if he started this and then thought - wow. I don't want to do this, or he did do it to make the company more attractive to Disney. I'm more curious than ever of the story.

I took EXACTLY that from the article.  There's a quote where he said he was having a conversation with Kathleen Kennedy about making the company more attractive to a potential buyer.

Lucas asked if she was interested in taking over Lucasfilm. Kennedy may have been blindsided by the news, but she happily accepted the position. “When Kathy came on, we started talking about starting up the whole franchise again,” he says. “I was pulling away, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to build this company up so it functions without me, and we need to do something to make it attractive.’ So I said, ‘Well, let’s just do these movies.’ ”

Well, there's also the promotional budget to consider for Battleship as well.  A general rule of thumb in the movie business is that the promotional budget for a movie is another 50 % on top of that production budget.  A budget of $209 million is going to garner a marketing budget of at least $100 million.  With that in mind, it looks like the movie barely even broke even by your estimations.  And it still leaves me wondering why Hasbro thinks they belong in the movie business.

Some quick thoughts?

-The Hoth Rebel tank is pretty awesome, and total mini-rig fodder!

-Colors of costumes as they're seen in documentaries and costume reference photos won't necessarily come across in the completed film.  Set lighting and color timing (back in the analog days), now known as digital grading, will distort colors in the final cut of a movie.  So what may match costume reference photos may not look very similar to the look of a movie.

-The lightsaber duel practice sessions were pretty awesome.  Although I couldn't say for certain if Mark Hammill was sparring with David Prowse or swordmaster Bob Anderson.  And funny enough, Hammill was using an Obi-Wan Kenobi lightsaber hilt!

I'm not terribly surprised.  Halle Berry's star has fallen somewhat.  She's done some great work over the years, but it seems like she's not so much the darling of casting directors that she was 10 years ago.  And perhaps she's not getting the offers that she used to get?  I think that made casting her in this new X-Men project that much easier.

Fantastic!  I can vaguely recall seeing this on television around the time the movie was released.  Great stuff!

Hmmm.  I was thinking of picking up the Lannister version, but I wanted to find out if there was a Stark or Baratheon version first.  But now I may just get the regular Blu Ray / DVD / Digital copy version.

This isn't so much about the future of Star Wars, but more about Hasbro's recent past:

The more I think about it, the more I start thinking that between the G.I. Joe - Retaliation line (and the associated movie), along with the Battleship movie might be partially related to the current state of things we're seeing from Hasbro in the Star Wars line.  I get the sense that Hasbro getting itself involved (more directly) in the movie business may have been an unwise move, and it may have cost Hasbro a serious ammount of money.  You may recall that Hasbro has been trying to get more involved in generating their own media, like movies, television series, etc.  Is it possible that this foray into a new business has had a major impact on their toy business?

Look at the movie track record:  Battleship was a major bomb.  It cost some $200 million to make the movie, and it only grossed $65 million in the US.  The international numbers were not impressive.  Not a rave success for Hasbro Studios, by any stretch of the imagination.  Seeing how this movie was a partnership with Universal, I don't think Hasbro Studios was left completely holding the bag, but they probably dealt with a significant loss in the tens of millions of dollars.

And then there's GI Joe - Retaliation which essentially got pulled from it's original release date last year.  It sounds like the movie had major problems and needed to be seriously overhauled.  All the while the toy line was released and then there were rumors swirling that the product for the movie was going to be pulled from the shelves.

And then there was the news from the investor conference call that preceded Toy Fair.  Hasbro's CEO called on their various units to cut costs and to cut the number of SKU's for each license.  Lo and behold, we saw that the Star Wars line has been scaled back considerably with a focus on serious cost cutting.  Coincidence?  Hmmmm.

Another potential explanation is that the current ownership of Hasbro might be looking to sell the company.  Extreme cost cutting like we're seeing is occassionally the hallmark of a company trying to make themselves look as profitable as possible to a potential buyer.  All of this is food for thought on the state of things now and in the near future.