animation

End of Lucasfilm Singapore

Lucasfilm is shutting its doors here on Singapore and its Sandcrawler Building. An end of en era making Star Wars and VFX here.

WQ CG BOSS

Aug 16, 2023 — 2 min read

I just learned today from the news that Lucasfilm Singapore is closing its doors here and the sandcrawler building is sold to Blackstone Group in 2021 for about 175 Million USD.

Youtube Inside Lucasfilm Singapore

Disney Layoffs RK Outpost

Youtube Lucasfilm Sandcrawler Opening

I remembered graduating in 2012 and wanting to work on Star Wars The Clone Wars, unfortunately I did not make it and went to another industry but still brought along star wars fandom with me. But it looks like its not possible without moving to the US, Vancouver or Mumbai.

Disruptions and Economic Costs

Some of the reasons is the higher cost of running the operations and uncertain economic climate. Disney has also been on a series of layoff of workers in the US as part of cost cutting measures due to the economic uncertainty and reduced revenues.

This year ILM opened a studio in Mumbai I believe its due to lower costs and a larger talent pool, perhaps even more tax subsidies. While Singapore enjoyed this for the last two decades, we did have lower costs here and subsidies, I dont think they goverment can keep subsidising operations forever. I am not sure if there was enough knowledge transfer on animation production, the gold mine is still making IP and exploting it. Looking at Korea and China they have manged to groom their own talent pools to do it.

The last few years we have seen streaming tech advancing quickly with the rise of Netflix and Disney having to compete with them with Disney Plus. But I am not so sure the revenues are the same as before there has been many viewers unsubscribing perhaps due to content fatigue.

There is also the rise of Generative AI and all these tech disruptions has been putting pressure on the costs of production, that is where ILM Lucasfilm Singapore sits and helps makes the shows.

Even though star wars did well I see Lucasfilm wanting to be a license holder for their property and sub contracting out the animations, games and book rather than managing media production. The cost of making a big budget movie has sprialled out of control in the last couple of years.

I am happy that some fellow Sg folks got to work on the clone wars TV series its what kept the lights on for them all these years even after getting bought over by Disney.