It was never going to be easy for George Lucas to walk away from Star Wars. There is an amusing scene in The Force Awakens in which peppy young gun Finn (John Boyega) suggests using Jedi antics to break into a First Order base, only to be told by an incredulous Han Solo: “That’s not how the Force works”. We can easily imagine a similar look of disgust from Lucas when he found out that Disney wasn’t planning to use any of his madcap ideas for its new trilogy of films, following his sale of Lucasfilm and all rights to Star Wars to the mouse house seven years ago.
When you create the world’s most popular fantasy saga from the ground up (with a little bit of help from Akira Kurosawa) only to see the fans turn against it and the people you sold it to bring in younger, fresher talent to take charge, it must be hard to accept. Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger reveals in his new autobiography that Lucas was kept largely in the dark about plans for 2015’s The Force Awakens and most likely imagined right up to the last minute that the studio would be using his own ideas for the film.
The saga’s creator had provided story concepts for three new movies as part of his deal with the studio. It was only at a briefing ahead of The Force Awakens entering production that Lucas discovered Abrams and screenwriter Michael Arndt would in fact be working from their own treatment.
“George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded,” Iger writes. “I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better. I should have prepared him for the meeting with JJ and Michael, and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction. I could have talked through this with him and possibly avoided angering him by not surprising him.
“Now, in the first meeting with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”
Lucas has always deflected criticism of his wackier Star Wars ideas by pointing out that his thinking is based on the idea of constant evolution, which on the face of it sounds preferable to the nostalgic approach subsequently adopted by Abrams and Disney. Yet it was this focus on introducing new cultures and technologies that led to the awful prequel trilogy and its preposterous midichlorians – tiny beings that live symbiotically inside humans who are strong with the Force. Given we know that Lucas’s ideas for the new Star Wars films would have expanded even more enthusiastically into this territory (he wanted to introduce microscopic creatures known as the Whills who control just about everything in the galaxy) it’s no shock that Disney chose the knockabout space larks of The Force Awakens instead.
One of the most important moves Lucas made prior to handing over Star Wars was to recommend his Lucasfilm co-chair Kathleen Kennedy as the studio’s new president, a position she still holds. Kennedy has taken an occasionally ruthless approach to the saga, hiring and firing at will in order to ensure it stays on course. She brought in the excellent Rian Johnson, who wasn’t afraid to throw the cat among the pigeons with the surprisingly radical latest entry, The Last Jedi. But she also fired both Colin Trevorrow – who had been working what The Rise of Skywalker – and The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were overseeing Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Abrams’ eventual return, to oversee Episode IX, was seen as something of a coup, but Solo emerged as a somewhat dull and lifeless entry, a movie that felt squeezed together by too many hands. Iger has since admitted that Disney may have been overambitious in its attempts to release a new Star Wars movie every year, a policy that Kennedy must surely have played a part in implementing.
There is a certain irony, then, in this morning’s news that Kevin Feige – the producer whose work on the Marvel Cinematic Universe inspired Disney to turn the space franchise into an expansive macro-saga – is due to take on his own Star Wars film. It is hard not to imagine that getting him involved in Star Wars rather undermines Kennedy’s previously untouchable position as queen bee.
If so, we may finally be entering a true endgame for the George Lucas era of Star Wars, more than four decades after the little-known director of American Graffiti first introduced us to laser sword-wielding space monks, garrulous droids and sinister black-carapaced Sith lords.
