f1onagher
Well-known member
Disney never invited any of the actual old Star Wars architects into the room when they took over Star Wars. They wanted to reinvent the Star Wars moment from the 70s without grasping with the fact that the cultural zeitgeist was different back then. As such they just aped the big Star Wars moments and never engaged with a setting which gave any writer enormous room to maneuver. They simultaneously changed nothing while pointlessly changing any comfort food that could have been left behind. The easy play was to do the Thrawn Trilogy, not only does this give you leeway to recast the heroes but lets the writer introduce a slew of new characters for use in further productions. But that would have made the Empire the underdog and Hollywood writers don't know how to do that for a thousand and eight reasons."Star Wars" is dead. Kathleen Kennedy and Disney did the seemingly impossible: they killed what seemed to be an invincible franchise.
Look, if I had been in charge I would have considered the obvious: there is no possible way the Galactic Empire was going to just be gone after the Battle of Endor. Those Star Destroyers could not have been all the Empire had.
What would have almost certainly happened was, with the Emperor dead, the Imperial Governors and lesser bureaucrats would form petty kingdoms and political spheres. Even if the New Republic was competent (and in the Disney sequels they must have been imbeciles) it would take a long, long time to clean everything up. Against a common threat some of those entities would likely unite, and the New Republic would have to deal with resource allotment problems, it would take time for them to get it together, so those entities would solidify, even after three decades there would be much to be done, especially if the Empire had been an improvement for some worlds (e.g. laid-back governor who got things running and improved things).
The problem with the Disney sequels is that no matter how good someone's version would be we would still know what was going to happen with Luke and Han, and how incompetent Leia became. The only answer is to declare the Disney sequels as garbage that are NOT canon, just bad high-budget fan fiction.
If was up to me I would have started with the Truce at Bakura, used that to recast everyone (one of the like two things Solo did right was recast Han) and introduce all the new kids to star wars with a low stakes story set right after Return of the Jedi. From there start a series of movies where the New Republic works its was through various warlords, starting with the Eriadu Authority and Tarkins family and moving north. Make the confrontations with Zsinj, Thrawn, and the reborn Emperor the "Avengers moves" of the franchise and spin off the Rouges, Wraiths (as spies or commandos rather than pilots), and some other side adventures as streaming series to take advantage of other genres in the Star Wars universe. If you pace yourself and stick to one movie a year you can sustainably farm Star Wars for the better part of two decades without even trying.