It’s been almost 11 years since George Lucas decided to sell lucasfilm to Disney for 4 billion dollars. The purchase took very little time to prove very profitable for the Mickey Mouse studio, but Lucas has already shown on more than one occasion his disappointment at not having had more to say in the sequel trilogy starring Mickey Mouse. Daisy Ridley.
“Because they won’t do what I want them to do”
The point is that his plans for the series were very different and he himself is aware that fans would have hated his vision. However, it was initially said that Lucas was still linked as an advisor to the saga, but at the end of 2015 he made it clear why he decided to break with ‘Star Wars’ and not participating in the trilogy that started that same year with ‘The Force Awakens’:
They looked at the stories I had and said, ‘We want to do something for the fans.’…They decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do something of their own….They weren’t very interested in me anyway. participate, but if I get in there, I’m only going to cause problems, because they won’t do what I want them to do. And I no longer have the control to do it, and all I would do is mess everything up. So I said, okay, I’ll go my way and let them go theirs.
No big drama, but Lucas decided that he was not interested in the approach that Disney was promotingsince, according to him, “they wanted to make a retro movie. I do not like that. I work very hard to make each movie completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, to make it new.“. It is not difficult to understand the reasons for his disappointment.
Lucas himself had no problem saying about ‘The Force Awakens’ that “I think the fans will love it. It’s basically the kind of movie you’ve been looking for.“, Without going into details about it, something key here. Let’s keep in mind that he himself has stressed that he likes to surprise with new things, without taking into account whether or not the fans will like it, so this can be read as a few kind words without really praising anything.
In fact, Bob IgerCEO of Disney at the time, revealed in his memoirs published in 2019 that Lucas felt betrayed by the studio and that his reaction to seeing ‘The Force Awakens’ was to point out that “There is nothing new” and “there weren’t enough improvements visually or technically.” Come on, how happy he was not precisely with the result.
In Espinof | 4 great space sci-fi movies to watch on Netflix and other streaming platforms this weekend