Even though for many, there was much to dislike about the George Lucas‘ “Star Wars” prequels, you have to respect the guy for seeing it through because, in the end, what we were watching was, in fact, his full cinematic vision splattered on screen. Lucas created worlds unlike any others with the prequels, and while they were heavily flawed, but one must admire the way he built up these stories from scratch. This feat is even more remarkable when you look at how every successful movie today is based on some kind of source material. What Lucas did with “Star Wars” would probably not be able to happen with today’s blockbusters, or at the very least the lack of financing would stop short any kind of project of this magnitude.
It’s safe to say that it must have been heartbreaking for Lucas to sell the rights of “Star Wars” to Disney, a deal which he stated to Business Insider was akin to selling off one of his “kids.” He’s also been vocal about Disney’s insistence to take over complete creative control of the films.
“They looked at the stories and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans,’ ” Lucas said in 2015. “I said, ‘All I want to do is tell a story’… They decided they didn’t want to use those [my] stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing. They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — if I get in there, I’m just going to cause trouble because they’re not going to do what I want them to do. And I don’t have the control to do that anymore. All I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, ‘OK, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.'”
However, we barely knew anything about those "stories," that is until today.
Mark Hamill, has revealed fascinating details about Lucas’ planned sequel trilogy. Speaking to IGN, Hamill spoke of Skywalker's untimely fate happening in Episode 9:
“I happen to know that George didn’t kill Luke until the end of ‘[Episode] 9’, after he trained Leia. Which is another thread that was never played upon [in ‘The Last Jedi’].”
Clearly, Lucas was looking at having Leia and Luke at the forefront of his planned trilogy, would it have worked? We'll never know but having an older Leia and Luke training as Jedis would have been rather unrealistic, to say the least. Hamill wasn’t done either saying “George had an overall arc – if he didn’t have all the details, he had sort of an overall feel for where the [sequel trilogy was] going – but this one’s more like a relay race. You run and hand the torch off to the next guy, he picks it up and goes,” says the actor. Yikes. “Rian didn’t write what happens in ‘9’ – he was going to hand it off to, originally, ColinTrevorrow and now J.J. [Abrams]… an ever-evolving, living, breathing thing. Whoever’s onboard gets to play with the life-size action figures that we all are.”
And that, my friends, is what irks a lot of Star Wars fans these days, the fact none of it was pre-planned, they just went with the flow after every movie. Hamill, if you want to read between the lines, is none too please about what Disney did either.Kathleen Kennedy has mentoned that Lucas does give advice every once in a while, albeit in the quietest of whispers:“He’ll whisper in my ear every now and then. Usually, it’s something specific or important to him about Jedi training. Things like that,” she told EW.There have barely been any examples of Lucas interfering in the creative process of these new “Star Wars” films, with “Rogue One” director Gareth Edwards stating last year that Lucas’ input was limited to “jokes and encouragement to not screw up.”You have to think that despite reaping an incomprehensibly large sum of money in selling the rights to Disney, Lucas must still be heartbroken at the prospect of others messing around with a creative endeavor he’s worked on for more than four decades. He lived and breathed “Star Wars” since the ’70s, putting everything else on hold. People forget that he showed tremendous cinematic promise when he did 1973’s “American Graffiti,” a film which is still considered one of the milestones of 1970s cinema, and that he sacrificed that potential to fully delve into the “Star Wars” universe for the rest of his career. Here’s hoping Lucas can rest easy with someone else at the wheel.