As a “Star Wars” fan and the city’s economic development manager, Jason Crawford said he couldn’t have been more excited by the report.

“We, as a city, have a great relationship with Disney and ABC,” he said. “I know they do a lot of special effects out there,” he added referring to local movie ranches.

“We’d love to see it filmed here and we’d love to see it playing in the movie theaters here,” he said.

Here’s more commentary from industry experts.

Michael Corty, Analyst, Morning Star

“From Disney’s point of view it adds more valuable franchises to their portfolio essentially, with Star Wars being the key asset in this deal. There is already one movie scheduled to be made. It has potential for future movies, merchandising and with their parks franchises, spreading Star Wars across Disney, is where the upside would be for Disney.

“It’s certainly become a pattern of going out and buying new franchises. Pixar was the first big one, then Marvel, and now this one here.

“Because Lucas is private, I would assume most investors would be surprised. My point of view is that Disney already has a great portfolio and this adds one more. They don’t have any holes, but their past deals have been additive.”

BRETT HARRISS, ANALYST, GABELLI & CO

“They paid about $4 billion for Marvel and that was probably a pretty good deal. Disney for the last 7 years has been an acquirer of content properties: Pixar, Marvel and Lucas.

“It brings an established group of characters and evergreen franchises to a large media conglomerate with distribution abilities second to none.

At first glance it makes sense. I’m surprised by the deal. With that being said, Disney has experience with these types of acquisitions.’

MSNBC contributed to this report.