#1 Lucas: "Disney made up its own story" for SW7
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2015 9:25 pm
I can't help but laugh about this. Lucas sounds to me like he's trying to not be petulant.arstechnica.com wrote: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.