ST The Development Of The Sequel Trilogy

Except it is not similar. In virtually every way that matters.

 

I hesitate because, at this point, not much new can be said; we've discussed this from almost every angle. And so, with apologies...

Both the OT and the PT featured overarching storylines that ran through the respective trilogies. While Lucas may have had no reason to expect, with much confidence, that there'd ever be a sequel to ANH, the movie ended with a number of plot threads that could be taken up - and many were, with others added, in ESB. And ESB upped that ante. In other words, the OT formed a coherent overall arc, of raising the stakes, heightening conflict, developing characters, and increasing audience anticipation.

In many ways, the PT did the same, even though, interestingly, most of us knew "where it was going" (most obviously, we KNEW Anakin had to fall, and become Vader) . The three prequel movies form a coherent arc, developing the core characters and conflicts, leading to a very high stakes, high interest ROTS.

I think one major issue is that TLJ takes almost all the threads from TFA and either concludes them, or discards them as irrelevant. Very little builds. Kylo is no more formidable at the end of TLJ than he was before, despite now ostensibly being in charge. The seeming "next level threat" of Snoke? Resolved. Phasma? Apparently done. Finn, Poe, Rey? Well, they're Finn, Poe and Rey. We're not left eagerly anticipating anything. The Luke-Vader rematch after ESB? The Kenobi-Vader clash after AOTC? What does TLJ leave us anticipating, hungry for?

It's a very very odd trilogy. Of course, some series aren't built that way, but they're less trilogies than series. The Bond movies, for example, or even some of the superhero series, don't have a truly solid "overarching story" behind them. But that's an odd departure for Star Wars, where the "bigger story" has always been a feature.

 

A pretty significant reveal here that in the midst of prep on TFA, Kennedy offered Abrams the opportunity to also direct the next two films, which he declined.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/movies/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-jj-abrams.html

 

That was a good read!

TFS = The Force Sleeps?

 

Hoo boy. It was not Rian Johnson's responsibility to write or adjust TLJ based upon how audiences eventually reacted to TFA. He wrote TLJ based upon his own response to TFA and his perception of the existing saga. And that response is not solely a reaction to a script. He watched dailies throughout the production of TFA, and I'm sure he also got to see cuts of the film as post production occurred.

 

Terrio talks about the ST being thesis-antithesis—synthesis. So maybe TROS will have the story arc coherently revealed.

 

Was George Lucas going to have Han Solo killed off in his sequel trilogy? That's something that I have always wondered about his original story for the sequel trilogy. According to Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker was originally going to die at the end of George Lucas's Episode IX. So George Lucas was planning to have Luke die in his sequel trilogy, so I wonder if he also was planning to kill off Han Solo too.

 

It wouldn’t have surprised me. Kasdan and Ford wanted Han to die in VI. And maybe ford didn’t want to be in 3 more movies.

Having said that, if Lucas had done these 3 movies sans Disney as creator, showrunner, executive producer and story, people would still complain, albeit for different reasons. Even so, Disney sans Lucas still doesn’t feel right to me.

 

TROS SPOILERS!!!!!!!!

Spoiler

Do you think Palpatine having a lover came from Lucas's treatment for that underworld show? I remember something about how it revealed the love life of Sheev or something like that...

 

Tell you what though. If Disney had taken the story treatments Lucas had and actually took the time to let JJ and/or Rian Johnson adapt or refine the story we may have gotten a really rich trilogy. George conceptually speaking has great ideas.

 

Right. I love the PT. And it wasn’t the train wreck some may falsely portray it to have been, and it’s gotten more love over the years. That said, there are people who love SW and don’t like the PT. Their reason is that GL may have great ideas, but they don’t like his writing and directing actors.

With The Clone Wars we got Lucas as creator and showrunner. He wasn’t a silent partner. But Filoni had no small roll in the direction and realization. And Lucas hired writers.

If Lucas had been showrunner or at least had done the job he was hired to do as creative consultant, and Disney had taken its time, who knows what may have happened. With GL in charge the release dates would have been 2015, 2018, and 2021. That’s one reason Lucas didn’t do the ST himself. He’d be nearly 80. But also he was tired of the hate.

 

Ok, here's a fair critique of the scheduling of this trilogy: Abrams only had one year of preproduction on both of his films and Johnson had nearly two. It shows.

TFA: Abrams hired January 2013, principal photography began May 2014.
TLJ: Johnson hired June 2014, principal photography began February 2016.
TROS: Abrams hired September 2017, principal photography began August 2018.

 

Here's something that George Lucas said about his sequel trilogy.

“[The next three Star Wars films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. But there’s this world of creatures that operate different than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”

“Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we were just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in…We’re vessels for them. 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.”

“All the way back to – with the Force and the Jedi and everything – the whole concept of how things happen was laid out completely from [the beginning] to the end. But I never got to finish. I never got to tell people about it. If I held onto the company, I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, 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.”

So what do you fans think of the concept? I personally think it sounds interesting.

I wonder what role the Whills would've played in his sequel trilogy, like were all of them going to be good or evil or were some of them good and some of them evil?

I also wonder how powerful they were going to be, like were they going to be "god-like" in the Star Wars universe?

 

Right now, I don't know if Disney have the right writers to make this storyline happen.

I don't think that extra year helped Johnson at all.

 

JJ should have written the main treatment of the whole "3 parts story" even before the pre-production of TFA. We'll never know why on earth Disney and KK's Lucasfilm opted to write the trilogy "one film at a time". TLJ was like a big cruiser stranded in the middle of the ocean, and while it has finally reached destination with TROS, damage has been done and a lot of customers are unhappy.

 

I suspect many ideas and plot points of TROS are Lucas'.

 

JJ did write them according to various sources (and created backstories for various characters including Snoke and Rey). The problem is Rian Johnson either didn't know about them or was given permission to ignore them entirely. The execs at LFL actively shot down any attempt at creating a roadmap for the sequels. First with Lucas's treatments then with JJ's.

It depends entirely on the execution. The entire Yoda Arc in Clone Wars Lost Missions did a lot of similar things explaining the Cosmic Force and the Living Force, showing us the Force planet, further explaining midichlorians and introducing the Force Priestesses. And it was all well done (unlike say people's beef with TPM).

 

Then it was a stupid executive decision and it shows in the final product. JJ truly fixed a sinking ship with TROS.

 

Late to discover this thread, and haven't read all 102 pages, so apologies if this has been discussed, but --

I've heard the original GL treatment of Ep. 7 described this way:

(thanks to @indydefense in the Ep. 9 Box Office thread)

So, two questions:

1. If many people who didn't like TLJ mostly didn't like the portrayal of "grumpy/depressed" Luke, why is there this pervasive belief that if LFL had only used GL's treatment for the ST, everything would've been ok? (i.e., it sounds to me like Luke is grumpy and depressed in GL's treatment, too)

2. One thing that Pixar does insanely well is develop the stories of their films. They have a very rigorous process to workshop characters, dialog, plot, structure, etc. -- takes them forever but their home run rate is like 95%. Given that LFL and Pixar are corporate cousins, anybody else think it would've been a good idea to get the Pixar story development process transplanted into LFL in some way? (I'm not saying Star Wars should be "Pixar-fied", just that the process Pixar uses to develop stories might have been useful when developing the ST)

 

From what I can gather, the difference with Lucas's outlines is that Luke goes into exile during a time of peace. The emergence of a new threat is what helps him (relucatantly) come out of exile. I imagine it would've been similar to how Picard convinced Kirk to leave the Nexus in Star Trek Generations.

 

It's never been confirmed by George Lucas himself if the hermit Luke was his idea or not since the people at Lucasfilm and Disney are saying that and not Lucas himself. The people at Disney and Lucasfilm also said that George Lucas's sequel trilogy would have involved around teenagers, but Lucas himself said that the characters were in their early 20s and were not teenagers. So I wouldn't trust anything that comes out of Disney and Lucasfilm's mouth when it comes to what George Lucas's ideas were for the sequel trilogy.

 

He is not credited anywhere, so I suspect nothing in TROS is Lucas' actually.
I don't see how Lucas would have brought back Palpatine.

As for the myth about the "Colonel Kurtz" figure that Luke would be, that's just a one liner from a person who drew some concept art. I do not trust this source even for one second, and I seriously doubt that Lucas would have deconstructed Luke in any possible way. If he was a hermit, he could have been a hermit who had unlocked all the secrets of The Force and was at a much higher intellectual level than any other being or something like that. We will never know. Assumptions are free to make, but they don't hold a lot of weight.

Abrams had 16 months for TFA according to this and RJ had 20 months for TLJ. That's not such a dramatic difference. I am also baffled by how it shows that Abrams had less time.

 

Of course he's not credited. But stuff like the wayfinders, the dagger, etc, smell of Lucas. Some of his ideas for TFA were about some ancient sith artifact that was a threat if used by the wrong hands, or something like that. TROS feels like a Lucas SW movie anyway, somewhere between ROTJ and ROTS.