Lucas: "Disney made up its own story" for SW7

[rhoenix]

On Tuesday, George Lucas continued making the promotional interview rounds for his latest film, the digitally animated musical Strange Magic, which meant interviewers made sure to ask slightly irrelevant questions about the next Star Wars film. In one of those interviews, Lucas disclosed a surprise tidbit about the upcoming film Star Wars: The Force Awakens: he had a lot less to do with it than his title as "creative consultant" might make you think.
"The [story ideas] I sold to Disney, they [made] the decision that they didn't really want to do those, so they made up their own," Lucas said in an interview with Cinema Blend. "It's not the ones I originally wrote."

This only adds to the list of things we know will not be involved in Episode VII's plot, which also includes the entire "expanded universe" of the series that won't factor into the new film (and in our opinion, that's great news). As Cinema Blend's report pointed out, the only public statement about how an after-the-originals trilogy might play out came from Mark Hamill in a 1983 interview, in which he said that Luke might return as a mentor for the next heroes of the Force. Indeed, we know that Hamill and five other original cast members will appear in the new installment.

In a recent interview with USA Today, Lucas admitted that he'd planned on leading the development of Episode VII and then selling the company afterward, but Disney's buy-offer timing meant he could "get out at the beginning of a new thing and just remove myself." From the sound of it, Disney made him "get out" even earlier than he'd anticipated, and the mere suggestion of Lucas's decoupling from the franchise was enough to excite fans all the way back when the sale to Disney was announced in 2012.

I can't help but laugh about this. Lucas sounds to me like he's trying to not be petulant.

[frigidmagi]

I don't think to many people will be broken up over that honestly.

[Lys]

Right now Disney has a lot of good cred for making excellent movies. Georgie-boy? Not so much. If they saw fit to throw out his ideas and go with their own instead, then so be it. As I see it, Disney's judgement on what does and doesn't make a good movie is far more trustworthy than Lucas'.

That said, that Lucas wasn't involved should have been evident from the trailer. Specifically the line, "The dark side, and the light." In Lucas' Star Wars there is no light side, there is the Force, and then there is the dark side of the Force. The two do not exist in balance with each other, rather the Force is itself balance and peace, while the dark side is itself imbalance and turmoil. To be in balance with the Force is not to hold dark and light in equal measure, that's nonsense, you cannot have balance by balancing it with imbalance, rather you have balance by not having any imbalance at all. Put another way, if you think of the Force as a weight scale, then the dark side is a set of weights, such that the only way to balance the scale is to place no weights upon it.

This is honestly one of Lucas' better ideas, it's basically Buddhist mysticism as applied to space wizard samurai monks, but he's done such a piss poor job of getting it across to the audience that by now the idea of light vs dark is firmly engrained in the popular conciousness. It doesn't surprise me if Disney is choosing to play to the idea that people recognize, and not the what was originally intended. To be successful art must necessarily understand and engage with cultural expectations, and in this case it might be a better choice to play to those expectations than to try and stick with Lucas' conception.

[Mr. Coffee]

Disney has decided the EU means nothing. Disney has decided that the movies is it and that's bfuckng that. If it keeps Karen Traviss from writting shit, I fucking behind it nd I don't care if Disney wants an explicit scene of Han stroking his motherfucking wookie. This is a version free of Lucas. I will wait to see what they give me, and I will judge it accordingly to what Lucas gave me.

That sets a goddam high bar, folks.

No Gangans or wanked out Mandalorians? I'm down.