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Lucas Kept Changing His Mind About Making Sequels
While some may claim that the entirety of the Star Wars saga simply popped into George Lucas’ brain, fully-formed, like an immaculate conception of intellectual property, clearly that wasn’t the case – as evidenced by the fact that Sir Alec Guinness never once waxes rhapsodically about the delicious nerf-burgers at Dex’s Diner. Lucas talked frequently about his ideas for the future of Star Wars, but they were rarely consistent.
As early as 1978, Lucas was discussing hypothetical sequels, claiming that there would be ten more movies after The Empire Strikes Back – so four trilogies in all. Just a year later, he clarified that there were actually “nine films in a series of three trilogies” and, as was reported at the time, the third would focus on the “gimmick of re-uniting the aged original cast.” In 1983, Lucas again stated that there would be three trilogies, plus “another couple of odd films.” Which, weirdly, is almost exactly what happened in the end.
But after Return of the Jedi came out, it became clear that Lucas cared more about producing comedies about unnecessarily horny ducks than Star Wars sequels. He even allowed Bantam Books to publish official sequel novels in the early ‘90s, with the explicit instruction that the prequel era was off-limits, telling the publisher “I’ll probably never do sequels.” And while promoting the release of The Phantom Menace, Lucas admitted in an interview that he “never had a story for the sequels” a revelation that made headlines at the time. In 2008 he bluntly told an interviewer that: “There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX … because there isn’t any story.”
Seemingly, the only reason why Lucas began working on the sequel trilogy, in the end, was a financial one. With no more Star Wars movies in the pipeline, Lucasfilm wasn’t in great shape. Lucas either had to begin working on Episode VII or “accept that layoffs were inevitable.” And once he had decided to sell the company, work on the sequel was expressly to make Lucasfilm more “attractive” to Disney – which perhaps explains why he hired Toy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt to write the script. While much of that preliminary work done by Lucas was ultimately tossed in the trash compactor by Disney, we do know that …
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The Main Villain Would Have Been “Godfather” Darth Maul
Lucas’ heroes likely would have been a Han Solo-like dude named Sam and a prospective female Jedi named Kira, who would eventually morph into Rey. Oh, and they were probably both Darth Vader’s grandchildren – for sure neither were ever the secret offspring of Emperor Palpatine’s botched clone.