George Lucas: Shut Down By Disney, Refused To Use Star Wars Episode 7 Ideas & 'Force Awakens' Plot Details: Better For Not Having Creator & Original Director Involved?
Turns out Disney agreed with the rest of the world and decided that it would be best if Star Wars creator George Lucas wasn't allowed to get his grimy, Jar-Jar Binks-introducing hands near another run of Star Wars films and ruin them. Because, even though Lucas revealed he was planning on directing Star Wars: Episode 7 before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion two years ago, he was politely told 'um, we're good thanks George' when he proffered his plot ideas for The Force Awakens. Now we have JJ Abrams directing The Force Awakens, and the galaxy far, far away is (relatively) safe.
Nick Romano of Cinema Blend reports that, when speaking about Lucas's new movie Strange Magic and asked about the ideas he'd been having for the Star Wars sequels, George replied "The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it's not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens]."
Smart.
As Entertainment Weekly say, however, "It's not really clear if Lucas had a specific story in place for Episode VII, or just vaguely-defined notions like "Han and Leia's children have lightsabers" or "this time it's personal" or "Death Stars???" or "Z-wing.""
To be fair, judging from the prequel trilogy, that sounds exactly what Lucas probably came up with.
Maybe Disney didn't go in for the ideas he was pitching and had him stop after he pitched them 'new CGI Ewoks', 'unnecessarily complicated and blatantly ridiculous/boring political intrigue', 'Lando Wookie' and 'shoehorned awkward love story'.
And considering he reportedly only finally just saw the trailer for The Force Awakens "because I don't watch movies online" - proving that's he's definitely in touch with modern society and technology - this is pretty good news.
Again. "I don't watch movies online," George? Remember, this is a guy who can buy the world's biggest internet TV... but doesn't watch movies online.
As Romano says, "Unfortunately, he wouldn't go into detail about his early ideas for his Star Wars: Episode 7 script," but brings up the idea of a discussion Mark Hamill and Lucas reportedly had in 1983 that involved Luke Skywalker in an Obi-Wan Kenobi-type Jedi mentor role.
You can listen to the rest of the Lucas interview at CinemaBlend.com.
Romano then lists basically what we know so far of Force Awakens, pointing out that we know that "Oscar Isaac will portray an X-Wing pilot named Poe Dameron," that Attack The Block star John Boyega "will play a fleeing Stormtrooper (or, more likely, someone disguised as a Stormtrooper)," that "Daisy Ridley will play someone named Rey who knows how to ride a Speeder," and, finally, that "there will be a new Sith named Kylo Ren and a new droid named BB-8."
So. That's good news.