We know that Disney rejected George Lucas’ base idea wholesale to start from scratch and do their own thing, which created a member-berries clone of the original star wars movie in The Force Awakens that only went downhill from there into the biggest mismanagement of a franchise in history.
But George Lucas is perhaps done with this NDA period and revealing what he originally planned. Source, Bounding Into Comics:
“It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there’s this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi. He puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left.”
“The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds, and train them. It’ll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi,” Lucas explained.
He then described what Star Wars would look like following this trilogy, “By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.”
At least it makes some semblance of sense compared to the trainwreck. Resistance vs. First Order? It doesn’t even track with the continuity.
The story would still suffer from “strong female lead” syndrome, but at least with someone older and doing something interesting like building a republic, rather than some random young hot girl who happens to beat up everyone, or like I call it, Joss Whedon-itis.
What do you think?
I was done with Star Wars after Episode 2, so I really have no stake in this, but at least Leia has that biological connection to Anakin, and she’s an established legacy character.
*Shrug* As far as I’m concerned, the back half of the Skywalker Saga looks like this
Episode VII: Heir to the Empire
Episode VIII: Dark Force Rising
Episode IX: The Last Command
Episode X: Specter of the Past
Episode XI: Vision of the Future, Part I
Episode XII: Vision of the Future, Part II
Coda: Survivor’s Quest
Interstitial stories include The Truce At Bakura, the X-Wing books, Dark Empire (I don’t much like what it did to the EU, but too much hinges on it), The Jedi Academy Trilogy/I, Jedi (same, although I, Jedi corrects a lot of the worst bits). 🙂
Based list.
For a more substantial comment, I could do without the gratuitous ‘Leia was the real Chosen One’ retcon, but the basic structure and story seem sound. I’ve never liked bringing Darth Maul back, though, whether it be in TCW or here.