Unless you’ve been hiding out in a galaxy far far away, you probably know the new Star Wars movie “The Force Awakens” is coming out this week. A splashy Hollywood premier on Monday, rollout Thursday night—in what is anticipated to be the biggest weekend release of all time, and possibly the highest grossing movie ever, producing a bonanza for its owner, the Walt Disney Company (DIS). I feel compelled to write about this in the same way a political writer has to write about Donald Trump even though everyone else is, but also because I think there are some pretty interesting subplots here about Disney and content in general.

You may remember that Disney bought Lucasfilm, the production company founded and controlled by George Lucas, in 2013 for some $4 billion. There was some gnashing of teeth at that point by the Disney faithful for a number of reasons. There hadn’t been a Stars Wars film released since 2008, and the latest SW offerings, while money makers to be sure, hadn’t exactly bowled fans over. Plus, Lucasfilm’s historical distributor, 20th Century Fox, will own the last two epics until 2020, and the original 1977 Star Wars film in perpetuity. So what was Disney really getting for its $4 bil?

Actually a lot. Disney is expected to put out two more films over the next four years, and according to the LA Times, analysts say the total revenue generated could be as much as $25 billion. Now it’s tricky to estimate how much of that windfall accrues to Disney—because a fair amount of that comes from licensed products. But here’s some back-of-the-envelope math. Let’s be conservative and say that Disney gets a 7% annual return on its $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilms over 10 years. That means it would have made a total of $3.87 billion by 2023. Considering that analysts are expecting the first film alone to gross as much as $2 billion—as much as the two biggest movies of all time, "Avatar" and "Titantic"—it’s likely that Disney will make far in excess. I say Disney could make $10 billion in 10 years on "Star Wars," and that would make the annual return jump to 13.4%. (Interestingly, Disney just reported 12% annual profit growth for its fiscal year.)

“Buying Lucas and making highly anticipated and apparently a great series of 'Star Wars' movies may be even better for Disney than buying Marvel or Pixar, which are each great deals,” a noted Hollywood dealmaker told me. And consider the original "Star Wars" that 20th Century Fox owns (Fox has retained the rights to the first six "Star Wars" films through May 2020). How much will that be worth to Fox in a few years, when every single other piece of the franchise is owned by Disney? "Star Wars" is already the most valuable movie franchise of all time. You almost wonder if at some point Disney has to break out the financials for the business.

Another thing to understand about the "Star Wars" calculus is that this type of deal is worth more to Disney that anyone else. No company is better at pushing intellectual property (read Chewbacca!) across its platforms—theme parks, cruise ships, TV shows, music, videogames and merchandising—than Disney. In other words if Time Warner (TWC) bought Star Wars, it would have had to pay less to make the same return because that company isn’t as adept at monetizing as Diz. Not that TWX is necessarily inept; it’s just that Disney is so damn good.

All of this has become even more important lately to Disney because the company’s incredible growth engine, a.k.a. ESPN, has been wheezing as of late. Here's some background: About half of Disney’s $13 billion in operating profit comes from its cable networks—which has a profit margin in excess of 40%—and the great bulk of that comes from ESPN. True, Disney doesn’t break out its numbers for ESPN, so what do we know? Well, over the past two years ESPN lost some seven million subscribers—down to 92 million subs. So do the math: If the average ESPN subscriber has paid $6.61 a channel per month, ESPN has lost over half-a-billion dollars of revenue annually since 2013. And that doesn’t count losses at ESPN2 and other ESPN networks. Meanwhile, ESPN pays out some $6 billion a year to leagues for broadcast rights. Now wonder the once-flush network has been laying off high-priced talent.

None of this is to suggest ESPN is dead or dying. Live sports are still a holy grail for advertisers, and fans will want to watch on any device. But ESPN has always been different from other Disney properties in that the company doesn’t own its intellectual property. In other words, Disney can’t have a LeBron James ride at its theme parks or sell LeBron apparel, or actually, it could but it would just have to pay again to license it. That’s very different from blasting out “Frozen” costume sets, dolls and tiaras—260 items in all—at the Disney online store (BTW, Star Wars already has 315 items there).

Star Wars, even as the biggest movie franchise of all time might not be big enough alone to mitigate a decline in ESPN, but it sure goes a long way. Look at it this way: In 2012 the Guinness Book of World Records estimated that the total value of Star Wars was $30.7 billion. Remember, that’s before this latest deal. At its peak several years ago analysts estimated ESPN was worth $50 billion. At some point the values of these two properties could flip flop.