What was George Lucas's Star Wars Sequel trilogy really about?
And did he ever even intend to make it?
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In 1983, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi ended with the realization of Luke's dream to become a Jedi Knight, having conquered his greatest trial to assume his destiny. His father redeemed, an Empire vanquished, and a new mission from Yoda to "pass on what he has learned." It would be many years before we saw where the journey went from there -- and once we finally did, it was to a Luke who had already taken that journey, now at the end of his life. Was that always the way the story was meant to go? With the acquisition of the Star Wars franchise from its creator, it's tempting to speculate otherwise. After all, it's common knowledge in the Star Wars fandom that from the earliest days of the franchise, Lucas intended to make a trilogy of sequels someday. How different might those stories have been from the saga of Rey Skywalker we received?
One of the most fantastic things about Star Wars is how it seems to begin in the middle of a much larger story. A perfunctory text crawl in the first film gives the viewer the barest sketch of what’s happening in a Galaxy at war before throwing you head-first into the action, and engages your imagination with hints of Clone Wars and fallen Jedi Knights as you get deeper within. It’s for this reason that by the time Star Wars was re-released in theaters in 1981, it was with the new subtitle of ‘Episode IV: A New Hope.’
By the time that it was clear the first Star Wars movie was a hit, where the franchise would go next was all anyone could talk about. George Lucas himself had early ideas about exploring the youth of Obi-Wan Kenobi, a notion which would become the prequel trilogy. But it soon became common knowledge among Star Wars fans, which from 1977 to 1983 encompassed practically all of culture, that the Star Wars franchise was expected to follow a sequence of three trilogies: the story of Luke Skywalker, a prequel trilogy about the rise of the Empire, and then three more films which would take us to Star Wars’ future as Episodes 7-9 of the Star Wars saga. The dream of the Sequel Trilogy was one which wouldn’t be realized until 2015, when Disney had acquired Lucasfilm from George and made the long-promised films themselves… to wildly fluctuous degrees of fan approval.
Whether you liked the Sequel Trilogy we eventually got or not, though, many can’t help but wonder what George Lucas’s intentions for those movies actually were. From 1999 on, Lucas would usually say when asked in interviews that he never actually intended to make sequel films at all – that it was simply an option he was keeping open for himself should he choose to make more Star Wars down the line at best, or perhaps more pessimistically, a way to humor the media which hounded him with requests for updates on sequels.
But that wasn’t always Lucas’s stance. The idea that there were more than six Star Wars movies planned had to come from somewhere. And from 1977 and onward, while rare, Lucas himself and those closest to him were known to comment from time to time on their intentions for Star Wars films after Luke Skywalker completed his journey to Jedi knighthood. So what actually were those plans – or, at least, what were we led to believe about them, before Disney would tell the story for us? Let’s see if we can cobble together a picture of George Lucas’s Star Wars Sequels.
Star Wars' serial ambitions
The earliest comments about sequels to the Star Wars films come from comments Lucas made in Bantha Tracks, a bimonthly Star Wars fan newsletter which ran from 1978 to 1987. One of the greatest influences on Lucas when creating Star Wars were science fiction film serials from the '30s and '40s like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. (In fact, Lucas attempted to secure the rights to Flash Gordon before ultimately making his own science fiction feature when he couldn’t afford them.) With an opening crawl even emulating that of the Flash Gordon serial, the first Star Wars film was clearly meant to emulate the phenomenon of seeing an installment of a weekly serial at your cinema with only a scrolling title card to catch you up on what you missed.
Lucas’s earliest ambitions for Star Wars sequels were to continue this theme, with each Star Wars movie being an entry in a more episodic franchise where each could be enjoyed on its own merit while existing within the continuity of a larger story. Because most of the serials of this era ran for 12 installments, Lucas proposed that there would be 12 films in the Star Wars franchise.
Each of these might concern Luke Skywalker and his friends, or they might not, choosing to focus on a different corner of the vast galaxy. As a friend and contemporary of trendy ‘New Hollywood’ directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg, Lucas envisioned that each installment of Star Wars could be helmed and directed by one of his famous friends, with Lucas himself returning only to do the final installment. Lucas often joked that the idea was that each director would attempt to outdo the work of the previous film, but by directing the final film, he’d get to have the last word without anyone outdoing him.
By issue eight of Bantha Tracks, the 12 film figure had been reduced to a perhaps more reasonable nine. But in those early days, apart from a vague idea that he’d like to see more about young Obi-Wan someday, the future of Star Wars was completely uncertain.
Star Wars 2
Without knowing whether Star Wars would be a big hit or a massive flop, Lucas was keeping his early options for the film’s future open. As told in The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski, Lucas contracted Alan Dean Foster, ghostwriter of the original Star Wars novelization released months before the film itself, to write a book that could potentially be adapted into a humbler sequel if Star Wars made enough money for a viable future, but at a less ambitious budget. This was the genesis of the first Expanded Universe novel, Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which sees Luke having his first lightsaber showdown with Darth Vader on a foggy planet while further exploring his feelings for the princess Leia. (Han Solo was left out of the story, as it wasn’t known at the time whether Harrison Ford would agree to return for sequels.)
But Star Wars was in fact an unprecedented success, meaning Lucas could do whatever he wanted for the sequels, and indeed indefinitely as far as an insatiable public was concerned. With a notorious distaste for scriptwriting himself, Lucas offloaded the writing of ‘Star Wars 2’ to The Big Sleep screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who passed away mere days after handing in a script Lucas was entirely unhappy with. Reluctantly, Lucas got to work on a new draft himself, where Darth Vader would be linked to Luke Skywalker as his true father, while Yoda would intone to Obi-Wan’s ghost that ‘There is another,’ setting up the earliest building blocks for a potential future for the franchise. From here, the idea that Luke would ‘pass on what he has learned’ was seeded through the following films, setting up the idea that this ‘Other’ Yoda mentioned might be taught the ways of The Force by Luke as Obi-Wan and Yoda had taught him. By Return of the Jedi, it’s revealed that the ‘Other’ was in fact Leia Organa. But that might not have always been the plan.
The Skywalker Sextology
Before he passed away in 2018, Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz would say the plan for the Star Wars movies, prequel films aside, was initially this: that in Episode VI, Luke would defeat Darth Vader, but the Emperor would survive. Episode VII would be the story of Luke’s ascendancy to Jedi Knighthood. In VIII, he would meet and train Yoda’s ‘Other.’ And together, by Episode IX, Luke and the Other would work together to defeat Palpatine once and for all. But according to Kurtz, the process of Empire Strikes Back had taken a severe toll on Lucas, to the point that he just wanted to end the series and move on with the last film. And so Vader and the Emperor would fall together, and the dangling “there is another” plot would be resolved by matching it to the only pre-existing character who could fit the bill, Princess Leia. There’s probably at least some truth to this account during some point of the Star Wars franchise’s development, but not much of it is corroborated by Lucas himself.
The Anakin Story
It was later in the development and subsequently to Empire Strikes Back that Lucas refined his answer to the question of Star Wars’ future – that his planned arc for Star Wars was 3 films featuring Luke Skywalker, and then another 3 films set 20 years in the past which would explore the rise of Darth Vader. For clear reasons, it was only after Empire Strikes Back’s success that Lucas began making statements that the entire Star Wars saga was truly about Darth Vader and his relationship to Luke. But thanks to Star Wars’ success, Lucas claimed, he had been inspired to plot an additional trilogy set another 20 years after the events of the central Star Wars story.
For many years, Lucas was evasive when asked what this sequel trilogy would be about. Usually, he’d remind the media that we had an entire prequel saga to get to first before even thinking about the sequel stories. Lucas claimed from early on that he had 12 page outlines for each of the nine films in the Star Wars saga, but these documents have never been seen.
Stunt Casting
There were two points on these sequel trilogies, during the development of the original trilogy, that Lucas was willing to speak on: casting, and broad themes. When asked if Hamill, Fisher, Ford, and the rest of the cast might return after Episode VI, Lucas would say he intended the casts to be entirely different for each trilogy of films – with a notion that the only connecting characters for all 9 films would be the droids, C-3PO and R2-D2.
Mark Hamill later said that Lucas approached him during the filming of the original trilogy about potentially making a cameo someday in Episode IX, in the Obi-Wan role to pass on the Jedi teachings to the next generation, some time “around 2011.” This lines up with comments Lucas sometimes made when pressed that, perhaps, if the cast looked old enough, he might cast them in minor roles for the next batch of films, though he would prefer if they featured an entirely different cast.
In the years following Episode VI, Lucas would relax this stance further still, envisioning a ‘reunion’ trilogy which would bring a cast flung apart by the years back together as older figures for one last adventure (or three). “The problem with that,” Lucas joked, “Was realizing that by the time the cast was 80, I would be 80 too.”
A Trilogy of Themes
But what was actually going to happen in those movies? Do we know anything at all about the story? One thing we have a good idea about is time. Lucas never intended Episodes 7-9 to take place right after the original trilogy. In fact, even as late as 1991, Lucas gave the okay for books in the Expanded Universe to start exploring the immediate aftermath of the Star Wars films as long as its relative future remained open for him to potentially explore himself. This was the genesis of such works as Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy.
Just as Episodes 1-3 would be set decades before the first Star Wars, VII-IX were always meant, at least from the time that Lucas first began entertaining their existence, to take place decades afterwards.
As a baseline, according to Lucas after Return of the Jedi was released, the sequels would be about rebuilding the Republic after the fall of the Empire, and “the necessity of moral choices, and the wisdom needed to distinguish right from wrong.” It would also concern “Jedi knighthood, justice, confrontation, and passing on what you have learned,” as can be gleaned from Luke’s conversations with Yoda in the original trilogy itself.
One thing we know for sure is that Lucas always wanted each of the three trilogies to feel like entirely different genres of films. If you’ve ever wondered why Episodes I-III don’t ever feel quite like IV-VI, don’t blame the advent of CGI. That’s by design. Lucas always intended the original trilogy to be an action adventure trilogy, where the prequels would lean towards a political thriller. For the sequels, at least according to Lucas’s few comments on his intentions for them, they seemed to lean towards more contemplative and philosophical, akin to Lucas’s early work on experimental films such as THX-1138.
“In Star Wars,” Lucas once said, “There’s a very clear line drawn between good and evil. Eventually you have to face the fact that good and evil aren’t that clear cut. And the real issue is trying to understand the difference.”
The Death of the Sequels
It was in 1999, with the impending release of The Phantom Menace, that George Lucas started shutting down sequel speculation; and owned up to the fact that he probably never meant to make them in the first place.
“I only [did] Revenge of the Jedi because I started it, and I have to finish it,” he said according to 1999’s Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas. “The next trilogy will be someone else’s vision.”
“Each Star Wars trilogy takes about 10 years from my life,” Lucas would say. “I’d like the next 20 years of my life to be about something other than Star Wars. Maybe when I’m 80, and if I’m vital enough to work until I’m 90, I’ll think about doing more Star Wars. But don’t count on it.”
The Disney Denouement
So, let’s take some stock of what we actually did get, as opposed to or in accordance with what Lucas promised. Did we get a story set decades after the original trilogy, with a mostly different group of characters? We did. Did Luke show up to pass on what he had learned in the Obi-Wan role to the next generation? He did at that. Were the robots still there to provide connective tissue between all nine films? They were indeed.
What about those notions of a reunion special of a far-flung cast? After a fashion, and in certain configurations, we got that too. The rebuilding of the Republic? Maybe not so much, but that’s being explored to an extent in the Disney+ streaming series. How about those philosophical themes that the right course of action isn’t always as black and white as the simple morality of the original trilogy was designed to make it seem? Friends, we call that The Last Jedi. Perhaps the character of the sequels as described by Lucas would have been very different, but many of their characteristics would likely have been the same. That is, if Lucas ever intended to go through with a sequel trilogy at all.
Whill They, Won’t They
In 2018, in a conversation with James Cameron for his science fiction genre docuseries Space, George Lucas reversed his position one more time. He did have a plan for those sequels all along. Just like he planned for Vader to be Luke’s father all along, and for Leia to be Luke’s sister all along, and whatever other sail barge over the Pit of Carkoon you’re interested in buying. And it was all about everyone’s favorite part of the prequel trilogy, the midi-chlorians.
“They were going to get into a microbiotic world,” Lucas said. “There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”
The Whills is a concept Star Wars fans should be familiar with, with ‘The Journal of the Whills’ being part of the rough draft of the first Star Wars film’s title.
“Everybody hated it in Phantom Menace when we started talking about midi-chlorians,” Lucas told Cameron. In the sequel films, Jedi would be portrayed as living “vehicles for the Whills to travel around in…and the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”
“Of course,” Lucas confessed, “A lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”
Hidden Talons
Two years later, Lucas would provide further insight into his plans for the Sequel Trilogy in an interview for the prequel film making-of book The Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III 1999-2005. Here, contrary to prior statements, Lucas suggests that Leia was, in fact, always meant to be the Chosen One whom Yoda was referring to with his cryptic "there is another," and that this would have played out in the sequel trilogy, where she would confront Darth Maul's secret apprentice -- the Twi'lek Sith Darth Talon, who first appeared in the Star Wars: Legacy comic series set a hundred years after the films in 2006 and was created by John Ostrander and Jan Duursema, but to whom Lucas had taken a liking. In Lucas' remarks here, he outlines a trilogy where Leia assumes the position of Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic while Luke seeks out the survivors of Order 66, while Darth Maul, having survived his bisection in Episode I and equipped with mechanical legs, had been building a secret empire in the background through consolidation of the Galaxy's criminal elements for the past fifty years.
Just how long these plans were part of Lucas' conception of the sequel trilogy, we have no idea. But there does seem to be at least some truth to it. According to Dave Filoni, Lucas himself consulted with him on The Clone Wars to orchestrate Maul's return and ascension to galactic crime lord, a story we saw continue to play out even in the Disney period during the last moments of Solo: A Star Wars Story. In a 2014 interview with Game Informer in their 254th issue, the developers of the canceled Star Wars: Legacy video game stated that Lucas intended to somehow pair Maul and Talon, though separated by 150 years in the timeline, stating "They're friends!" and apparently leaving them to sort that out. So while these ideas may not have always been Lucas' intention for the sequels, they do at least represent what he had percolating by the time he gave the franchise up.
Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen
In 2010, the entire world seemed to be tuning in for the series finale of LOST, an infamously mysterious television series which had people guessing how it would all turn out until the very end -- George Lucas included. During a special wrap-up post-show, Barry Jossen, an executive at ABC, read a fan letter that Lucas had written in congratulations to showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse on bringing their saga to a close. In it, Lucas reveals one of his greatest secrets:
"Don't tell anyone," Lucas wrote, in a rare moment of openness from the creator of one massively popular series to another, "But when Star Wars first came out, I didn't know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you've planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories -- let's call them homages -- and you've got a series."
Was there ever a grand plan for the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy? The answer is probably not. There's plenty of evidence that even the trilogy we eventually got was rewritten and second-guessed to the last minute. In a Jimmy Kimmel Live interview, Daisy Ridley indicated that even the identity of Rey's parents would tend to change back and forth between rewrites. If these films had been released even one month earlier, or later, the story we got in the end might have been completely different -- and someone would still be claiming it had all gone according to plan. The truth is that, at its most essential, being a writer and being a liar are synonymous occupations. Why stop on the page, when you can maintain the illusion for a spellbound audience? Ask any tabletop dungeon master: with most stories, the only real plan is to maintain the fiction that there was ever a plan at all.
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