What George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episodes 7, 8 and 9 would have looked like

George Lucas has not made a Star Wars movie since Revenge of the Sith, but that did not stop him from imagining where his franchise might have gone. As long as there’s a Star Wars series, Lucas has openly talked about how his version would have ended even after selling Lucasfilm to Disney. The story of the Skywalker saga, which ends in a few weeks with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, has been in the planning for nearly 50 years, and for most of them, the only person who could see the saga. The whole picture was George Lucas.

According to Mark Hamill, the first time he heard of a proposed sequel trilogy was in 1976, on the set of the first Star Wars. Lucas sat between the settings in the desert and told him that he had planned 12 movies in this series, and that somewhere around 2011, when Hamill was the right age, they would be shooting episode 9. And since then, it seems Lucas has never stopped planning these sequels. The filmmaker kept the details of his future films secret over the years, but when Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney in 2012, he finally began figuring out what Star Wars would have looked like had he stayed at the helm. Here is what could have been.

The characters of George Lucas’ Star Wars sequel trilogy

Lucas always had plans for a Star Wars sequel trilogy. The conception of the story, however, only began seriously when he was preparing to sell Lucasfilm. The idea was that he could send a new set of films to every conglomerate that bought his company in the right direction.

During a Tribeca Film Festival panel discussion in 2015, Lucas said his trilogy idea more or less picked up on the cloak given by the Expanded Universe novels. Lucas wanted his sequels to be another generation change. “The original saga was about the father, the children and the grandchildren,” Lucas said during the panel discussion.

Along with the return of the original cast that we also got in Disney’s sequel trilogy, Lucas’s sequels allegedly recounted the stories of Anakin’s two grandchildren, who were about 20 in the movies, so it was not “Phantom Menace” again. In the book “The Art of Awakening of Power,” one of the characters, a Jedi named Kira, is described as a “loner, hothead, cogwheeled, badass.” The other teenager was most often referred to as Sam and appears mostly with a blaster, suggesting that he himself had no powers. Finally, Kira and Sam transformed into Rey and some Finns, which makes sense: Lucas had developed his follow-up films with the help of screenwriter Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3), who later received a written award for The Force Awakens (The Force Awakens) first part from Disney’s trilogy.

Lucasfilm

Another main character, who apparently got a similar bow to his original version, is Luke Skywalker. Phil Szostak, the author of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi art books, gave a brief description of the Luke character in episode 8 in a tweet.

The idea of ​​a Luke Skywalker, who was struck by the betrayal of one of his students in self-imposed exile and spiritually in a “dark place” at the end of 2012, not only precedes Rian Johnson’s involvement in Star Wars, but J.J. Abrams, “wrote Szostak.

Conceptual artist Christian Alzmann published a Lucas-accredited image on Instagram in 2018, which is incredibly close to the version of Luke we see in The Last Jedi. The painted piece shows a grizzled, older Luke Skywalker. “Luke was described as Col. Kurtz-type hiding in a cave in front of the world,” wrote Alzmann.

The parts of Lucas’ episode 7 that did not make the cut

One small detail we know about the story of the later Lucas trilogy is that it focused on immersing in the “microbiotic world” where viewers would learn more about the power and how it works. Lucas planned to delve deeper into Midi-Chlorian science, the biological explanation for the power first mentioned in The Phantom Menace (and questioned by fans).

For James Cameron’s 2018 “Story of Science Fiction” book, Lucas said his trilogy was focused on “The Whills,” an ancient life form that fed on power. According to Lucas, the whills are essentially “the force”. The Midi-Chlorians in Force-sensitive beings communicate directly with the Whills and allow the overpowering beings to control the galaxy.

“I always used to say that this means we’re just cars and vehicles where the whills can move ( .), we’re ships for them,” Lucas said.

While the Whills would have been a new element in Lucas’ sequel trilogy, they are not new creations. In Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplay, Lucas is quoted as saying that in an early version of the script for A New Hope, the entire story should be told from the perspective of whills.

Disney / Lucasfilm

“Originally, I tried to tell the story of someone else (an immortal being known as Whill); There was somebody watching and recording this whole story, someone who was probably smarter than the mortals in the actual events, “Lucas told Laurent Bouzerau. “At some point I dropped that idea and the concepts behind the whills have turned into power. But the whills became part of this huge amount of notes, quotes and background information that I used for the scripts. The stories are from the Journal of the Whills. “

In the mid-1970s, Lucas introduced the “Journal of the Whills” as the historical text of the Star Wars universe, the story of the galaxy as written by the Whills themselves. (He gave the same name to his 40-page original saga design.) This eventually morphed into an early version of the original Star Wars script with the subtitle From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller in the Journal of the Whills. As Bouzerau notes in the annotated script, the chapters of Dune, which have clearly inspired Lucas, also begin with excerpts from a fictional history text. No wonder Frank Herbert was a little upset when Star Wars came on screens.

What kept Lucas from the actual Star Wars sequels

Disney made no progress with Lucas’ vision for episodes 7, 8 and 9. But what did he think of J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Kathleen Kennedy’s Ultimate Direction?

In a profile with the Washington Post, which was released in the run-up to the premiere of The Force Awakens, Lucas compared the sale of Lucasfilm to a divorce and watched the film after reluctantly attending a wedding. “I have to go to the wedding. My ex will be there, my new wife will be there, “Lucas said. “I have to take a deep breath and be a good person and push through and just enjoy the moment, because that’s what it is and it’s a conscious decision that I’ve made.”

When The Force actually rolled Awakens around, Lucas seemed to have seen it and received a more kindly reaction. “I liked it,” Lucas said on the red carpet. “I think the fans will love it. It’s just the kind of movie they were looking for. “Besides Lucas’s previous remarks on the version of the story he wanted and the way he thinks the fans reacted, the reaction reads like a faint praise.

Lucasfilm

Lucas has always had a difficult relationship with the Star Wars fandom and the classification of “The Force Awakens” as a movie he would like to see is not exactly a confirmation. According to the filmmaker, he was always disappointed that the fans were Star Wars and for him Disney and J.J. Abram’s film was a reaction to that fact.

“The problem was that they looked at the stories and said,” We want to do something for the fans. “People do not realize that it really is a soap opera and it’s about family issues – it’s not about spaceships.” Lucas said in an interview with CBS This Morning. “So they decided that they did not want to use those stories, they decided that they would do their own thing, so I decided on” Fine. “

Despite all his struggles with Star Wars fans, especially their reaction to the prequel trilogy. It seems that George Lucas wanted his version of the story told. So much money he has earned through the Lucasfilm deal, it’s hard not to see Lucas a bit disappointed. Lucas himself has perhaps best summarized his feelings in The Story of Science Fiction.

“If I had stuck to the company, I could have done it,” Lucas told James Cameron. “And then it would have happened. Of course many fans hated it, as did Phantom Menace and everything else, but at least the whole story would be told from start to finish. “

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