The New York Times ran a story today featuring a recent interview that George did. He expressed disdain for The Force Awakens, but more interestingly, he mentions that he had been writing a seventh installment for the Star Wars series.
Is there any information from other interviews or sources about what was going to be in his (thankfully never to be finished) script?
Answer
It's astoundingly unlikely Lucas' ideas for Star Wars 7, 8 and 9 will ever see the light of day. They were written as part of the negotiation with Disney for the sale of the Star Wars franchise and were ultimately rejected in favour of a script treatment written and supervised by Disney's own writers. As with any sale of Intellectual Property, these treatments are almost certainly covered by strict non-disclosure agreements on all side.
TotalFilm: Are you happy for new Star Wars tales to be told after you're gone?
Lucas: I've left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII - IX. That's because there isn't any story. I mean, I never thought of anything! And now there are novels about the events after Episode IV, which isn't at all what I would have done with it.
The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn't come back to life, The Emperor doesn't get cloned and Luke doesn't get married...
Lucas' scripts rejected by Disney
“They looked at the stories, and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans’….They decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing….They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — but 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, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, ‘Okay, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.'”
“They wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that. Every movie I work very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, make it new,”
Abrams interview with Vanity Fair
He sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX, to be set initially several decades after Return of the Jedi, and approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill about re-upping. He shared his story outlines with Disney during their courtship phase. But after the deal was done, “Disney and Kathy decided they should consider other options,” as Abrams (not then involved) diplomatically put it. He said Lucas’s treatments had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 14-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”
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