It's interesting to see this different take on TLJ, but I'm curious what you would have done with the whole trilogy. I know a lot of people like elements from what we did get and just want to kind of change things a bit to make it work better (I could even go that way myself), but there are others who would just adapt something from the EU, and others who would just go an entirely different direction.
I can go in lots of directions with this. Trying to fix up the actual trilogy is a discipline all by itself. It's not actually my preferred way of approaching all this, because even though you can turn them into something good... I fundamentally don't like the idea of adding three more episodes. I have strong preference for long-form story-telling and I feel that the 'film saga' really does conclude with RotJ. Whatever we tell next is a follow-up tied to it, but to me, it's not really fitting as "the next three episodes of that story". Because that saga is complete already. My preferred approach to a follow up is more "
Star Wars: The Next Generation".
Even if we commit to sequel films, though, there are some options that deviate wildly from the sequels that we got.
I'm going to list some alternatives that I am always happy to imagine:
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1) In some universe where I ran SW from the start, or at least the early '90s, I'd have made the prequels a few years earlier (different actors, no/less CGI, loads of script doctoring to improve dialogue). Then I'd have taken SW in a different direction in '99, after Zahn wrote
Vision of the Future. In 1999/2000, make a mini-series adapting the
Young Jedi Knights books, effectively introducing (the EU's) next gen characters on screen. Then, in 2005-2010, a way more heavily adapted high-budget series (think GoT level) based on the general premise of NJO. I'd do a lot differently there, because I have quibbles with the NJO series, but I'd strive to keep the best elements, and I'd work towards a similar conclusion. And when that ends, that would be the last thing featuring the OT heroes. Series set later and/or featuring other characters are very much possible, but avoid anything like the Denningverse. Leave the OT heroes' happy ending intact.
There can be little surprise that this would have been my ideal. I like a lot of the old EU, but I have long felt that the post-Endor stories ended up getting derailed in the end. This would be an opportunity to fix that, while doing something about the prequels, too.
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2) Assuming that's not possible, and we're working off the premise of "Disney buys it in 2012, what now?" ...then my preference would be to avoid sequel films, and instead make a
Jedi Academy streaming series. Why would that work? Because it's simply "Hogwarts but with Jedi and in SPACE". It's not a complicated idea, and there's no reason for anyone to dislike it. If you want to both present a next generation of characters and draw in a next generation of viewers, this is ideal. The big draw overall is that people get to see the new Jedi Order that Luke is building back up. The complaints about not getting that in the sequels are legion, and this solves that.
Naturally, bring back Hamill (who was most eager to reprise his role anyway) to be the wise Jedi Master (and functionally the 'headmaster'), add a few Jedi he's trained since the OT as fellow "teachers" (copy some folks right from the EU if you want), and have a load of apprentices-in-training as the main characters.
No galaxy-threatening plots under any circumstance! The New Republic has won. The OT's victory is not negated, but instead confirmed. The wider galaxy is doing fine. This is purely a series about smaller-scale adventures that enterprising young would-be Jedi might have. Hamill can do this for years without having to train for heavy action, because the stakes are relatively low and Luke's approach to teaching is "let the kids solve it for themselves if they can -- it'll be a great lesson". He only steps in when there's more serious danger.
The brilliant thing about this is that you could just track which main characters are most popular with the fans. And once these "graduate", just move those characters over to a spin-off where they have Jedi adventures all over the galaxy:
Knights of the New Republic. Again, nothing too large-scale. Just cool adventures. Meanwhile, the
Jedi Academy series can just keep going, introducing new, younger students as the older ones graduate. You can keep going as long as people keep watching.
This would also work perfectly well alongside other, "non-Jedi" series as well. Stuff akin to
The Mandalorian, but set in the '30s ABY instead. You could create a whole streaming-based slew of SW series, with the initial one having Hamill as the big draw, and then you could probably get Fisher and maybe Ford for occasional cameos. As well as other established characters, like Ackbar and the droids et cetera. Maybe have Denis Lawson back as Wedge Antilles in a "
Star Wars does
Top Gun" style series, and have him be to the young starfighter pilots what Luke is to the young Jedi.
I stress again that Disney would never have gone for this, but it would probably have made everybody happy. Because it provides a load of opportunities for new stories,
without fucking with anyone's happy ending. I can talk at some length about improving the sequels, or making different sequels... but
this would be better than making sequel films.
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3) If you do have to make three new Episodes, it's proably more interesting to avoid Disney's disjointed attempt altogether. Go with George Lucas's plans for the sequels, instead. He had plans since at least 1980, although he put them in a drawer for decades. In 2010, he revisited them, and they went through multiple iterations. This culminated in a c. 50-page treatment (covering the whole hypothetical trilogy) that he co-wrote with Michael Arndt. This is what he presented to Disney in October 2012. The next day, they finalised the sale of LucasFilm.
As we know, Disney immediately decided to start deviating from Lucas's plans. But Arndt stayed on as the writer, and he initially changed Lucas's plans gradually. When Abrams came on board, he started demanding far more drastic changes. Ultimately, Arndt couldn't make his story work (at least not in time), and departed. Abrams took over as the lead writer, and this led to TFA as we know it.
Over the years, a lot about Lucas's plans has trickled out. It's a huge mess, though, with various things we know clearly referring to different iterations of what he was planning in the period 2010-2012, and even old ideas he had long before. Lucas initially planned for his sequels to be filmed around the year 2000, and lots of his older ideas show that. (For instance, the next gen characters would be teenagers, and the sequels would be about rebuilding the Republic.) When it became clear that the films would have to be set 15 years later than he imagined, he changed things around. Books like
The Art of The Force Awakens reveal details about what was decided when, and that helps us piece together a timeline.
Interestingly, a lot of details from the sequels clearly did come from Lucas. They were just cannibalised and put into a very different context/framing. Luke was going to be in exile after a student betrayed him (but that student was an original character based on Darth Talon, whose design Lucas liked). Luke was going to be hesitant to train the young protagonist (but this would be resolved by the end of Episode VII). A son of Han and Leia was going to be seduced to the Dark Side (but this would happen during the trilogy, and Talon would be doing the seducing). There was going to be a planet-based superweapon on an ice world (but its design was nothing like Starkiller Base). There was going to be a shadowy villain who manipulated the 'fallen student' from the start (but it wasn't going to be Snoke).
That "shadowy villain", in fact, may well have been Palpatine in Lucas's version, too. He certainly intended that back in the day. He even outright mentioned that this was his plan: that Palpatine could become a ghost, too. An evil one. But by 2010, Lucas had changed that idea into Darth Maul being the evil mentor to Darth Talon. (This was when he still thought of the stoty as set 15 years earlier.) Darth Maul was going to be a criminal kingpin, even. That idea got re-purposed for
Solo. We know Maul didn't make it into the 2012 treatment, but Talon did. She was to be "puppeteered by a mysterious entity".
My personal guess is that Lucas went back to "evil spectre Palpatine is behind it all", in his 2012 treatment. It was his original intent, and it was also in
Dark Empire, which Lucas thought was great. If it had been planned from the start, it could even have been good. Maybe it could have tied the sequels into the overall saga a bit more (although I still think that effort would by definition be forced).
I've got a lot of notes on what Lucas thought about SW sequels, and when he thought it. The end result is still bare-bones, but gives us a decent idea of what he envisioned. It could be great. I have loads of ideas for filling in the gaps and writing a sequel treatment "based on the Lucas plans" (20.000 words and counting right now), but it's on the back burner presently. Kind of lost steam on that, and I'll pick it back up in the future. If I complete it, I'll post it here.
Bottom line: what we know of Lucas's ideas, incomplete as that knowledge is, sounds like the basis for a pretty cool story. I'd want to see it.
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4) If Lucas's treatment isn't up your alley, another option is to get a bunch of great writers and start discussing original ideas. Don't get hacks, like Disney did. There are great ideas all over the place, but studio management often has trouble identifying them. Many of the ideas I've seen suggested are bare-bones, but serve as potential seeds for wildly different sequel trilogies that could be absolutely amazing is executed well by capable people.
Examples include the suggestion young brought up just now (Rey was actually a non-force sensitive daughter of Han and Leia who took on the smuggler's life as a way of rebelling from her parents and her force-sensitive siblings, one of whom turns into Kylo Ren, and she then has to work to turn him back) or
@AnimalNoodles's proposal regarding Leia as the villain (because, yes, I do agree that she is much more Vader's daughter than Luke ever was Vader's son).
Another option, that I've thought about before, was to present a Ben Solo-analogue (a son of Han and Leia, doesn't have to be the same guy) as an anti-Imperial fanatic, instead of a neo-Imperial. In such a scenario, a peace has been signed and an Imperial Remnant still exists... and he wants to destroy it. Make him the ultimate Cold Warrior expy, the kind of guy who advocated all-out first nuclear strike against the USSR, but set in the SW galaxy. Then the story becomes about choosing moderation, reason and forgiveness (even for those who may not deserve it) instead of persecuting vengeance to the bitter end, no matter how many innocents die in the cross-fire.
All these options have lots of potential, but do need a lot of work before they're ready. If spun out into quality works, they'd be better than the alternatives I've ranked lower here, but as it stands, I haven't seen any of these ideas worked out into a full treatment.
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This gives you an idea of the options that I'd consider to be interesting and worth-while. Of course, sticking to the general outline of the sequels that we know while fixing their problems is also a viable option. I have extensive outlines for that, too. Also unfinished at present. (To be completely honest, the trash-can fire that is TRoS kind of killed my enthousiasm for even saving these sequels. No matter what you do, you're stuck basically re-writing TRoS from scratch. Barely anything in that film is worth salvaging.)
I can outline my ideas for how to generally fix the sequels, though. In fact, I see two routes you can go with this, so there's potential for two re-writes. This gets lengthy, and will take a while to write up, so I'll save that for a separate post.