Should Lucasfilm have taken a different approach?

[Yukaphile]

We all hear how the Star Wars movies are not doing so well, given how divisive The Last Jedi was, and that Solo bombed. If, as I suspect, the ninth episode doesn't do so well either, well... then it proves Lucasfilm is just out of luck.

But what if they had taken a different approach? My personal view is they should have tried to construct a canonized Legends timeline with the movies. You could still put a halt to all Legends material, and then declare it non-canon, but then start way at the beginning, with things like Dawn of the Jedi, then move to Tales of the Jedi, then the KOTOR era, and keep on building on that mythology. Doesn't that make sense from a cold, robotic, corporate standpoint as well? I know that their study groups tell them we are the generation of nostalgia, so bringing the main trio back was a ruthless business move to capitalize on that. But... it's only a temporary measure. All three are gone. Luke is dead. Carrie Fisher passed away. And Han was killed. Even bringing back Lando won't change that. Wasn't it logical to prepare for the future? Especially since, well, we know the big corporations aren't about putting in the hardest work, and they are not especially creative. It's about yielding the greatest capital from the least amount of effort. In that sense, they could tweak anything that's wrong with the Legends books, comics, games, etc, improve upon them, and then boom, there you go! I know doing a new "sequel trilogy" with Episode 7 was a way for them to "purge" the bad taste of the prequels from audiences' mouths, and bringing back the trio was, again, for nostalgia. The Force Awakens was proof they were too scared to do anything new. But... they really should have. Hell, they could have even kept their idea of a sequel trilogy, just adapt Legends. I'd have loved to see the Yuuzhan Vong War on the big screen, and that would be the era to fit the main actors. At the same time, you could prepare for the "anthology" series and make that the Old Republic era too. Adapt the Bane novels. Sigh, so much potential, pissed away because of corporate greed. What a waste.

What do you guys think? I feel like my idea of a "canonized" Legends timeline on the big screen would have worked, given how well the MCU is doing.

[Karha of Honor]

We all hear how the Star Wars movies are not doing so well, given how divisive The Last Jedi was, and that Solo bombed. If, as I suspect, the ninth episode doesn't do so well either, well... then it proves Lucasfilm is just out of luck.

But what if they had taken a different approach? My personal view is they should have tried to construct a canonized Legends timeline with the movies. You could still put a halt to all Legends material, and then declare it non-canon, but then start way at the beginning, with things like Dawn of the Jedi, then move to Tales of the Jedi, then the KOTOR era, and keep on building on that mythology. Doesn't that make sense from a cold, robotic, corporate standpoint as well? I know that their study groups tell them we are the generation of nostalgia, so bringing the main trio back was a ruthless business move to capitalize on that. But... it's only a temporary measure. All three are gone. Luke is dead. Carrie Fisher passed away. And Han was killed. Even bringing back Lando won't change that. Wasn't it logical to prepare for the future? Especially since, well, we know the big corporations aren't about putting in the hardest work, and they are not especially creative. It's about yielding the greatest capital from the least amount of effort. In that sense, they could tweak anything that's wrong with the Legends books, comics, games, etc, improve upon them, and then boom, there you go! I know doing a new "sequel trilogy" with Episode 7 was a way for them to "purge" the bad taste of the prequels from audiences' mouths, and bringing back the trio was, again, for nostalgia. The Force Awakens was proof they were too scared to do anything new. But... they really should have. Hell, they could have even kept their idea of a sequel trilogy, just adapt Legends. I'd have loved to see the Yuuzhan Vong War on the big screen, and that would be the era to fit the main actors. At the same time, you could prepare for the "anthology" series and make that the Old Republic era too. Adapt the Bane novels. Sigh, so much potential, pissed away because of corporate greed. What a waste.

What do you guys think? I feel like my idea of a "canonized" Legends timeline on the big screen would have worked, given how well the MCU is doing.

So they should / should have erased the EU and adapted it anyways starting with the most obscure least known stuff DOTJ?

[Winter]

Given the mixed reception of the series at this point and the fact that Solo bombed I wonder if the series is just going to Reboot. I mean by all accounts it already sort of did reboot when the series went on to say that all continuity of the Original EU was no longer canon but I wonder if the series will just our right repeat history and just reboot the series.

If they do I see it going on of two ways. One The just restart everything from scratch and say that everything SW will no longer be canon and that they'll just wipe the slate clean. This is very unlikely as I can't see ANYONE being on board for this. Fans of the classics will never stand for it and unlike so many other series Star Wars is so engraved into pop culture that everyone knows the story of the OT by heart even if they've never seen it so even non fans would be against it.

The other opinion is to just ignore everything starting from the Disney Era and just adapt the Original EU, starting with it's most popular story The Thrawn Trilogy. The reason I feel this is the more likely out come is that A) TTT is still as popular as it was back in 1991 so adapting that would make the most sense from a marketing stand point.

The only thing I would see as something fans would be against is the new cast playing the old favorites but if they got the right actors then I'm sure most fans would be okay with the new cast, even if going from Hamill, Fisher and Ford to whole new actors would be a little weird.

The third option, and this one is even less likely then the first, is to have a in canon Reboot. In Star Wars Rebels, which is actually a really good show, it was established that time travel is actually possible via path ways created by the Force. Now while the episode did seem to imply that changing the past is not technically possible the key word here is Implied so It would be interesting to see a whole film that was basically the Star Wars' equivalent of DC's Crisis of Infinite Earths.

That story ends with the characters making a few minor changes that result in Thrawn getting sent to the Unknown Regions, Han and Leia having twins instead of one son and Mara somehow being employed by Talon Karrde.

Then, after TTT is released Stop making SW films and just focus on making a TV Series or a series of mini-series that adapt any and all Original EU stories. From Dawn of the Jedi to The Old Republic comic series. Star Wars as a film series is seen as a special event, something that doesn't come along often but when it does it's something speical that must be taken notice. Which means no matter how hard a studio is to try it doesn't work as a MCU annual film series, where you release 3 or more films for this series in one year.

So adapting the Thrawn Trilogy as the only SW films and then just going over to TV and other media, like what was being done BEFORE Disney bought the series from Lucas, would be perfect as it was working just fine and Star Wars was still as popular as it ever was.

However, as of right now, I feel that whether it succeeds of fails after Episode 9 the series should take a break. No more films after 9, just let the series rests before it turns into a zombie franchise that keeps on going long after it's dead.

[TGLS]

Honestly, I think a soft reboot might happen. Get away from all the old events and make them (small l) legends.

[RobbyB1982]

Eh, once episode 9 is out they don't have to worry about the old stuff if they don't want to. Anything else from there can be set decades or centuries apart from the Skywalker stuff and be fine... though they're bound and determined to hamfist old favorites in no matter how nonsensical their inclusion is, so....

Don't need to reboot or retcon when you can just move away.

[Karha of Honor]

Honestly, I think a soft reboot might happen. Get away from all the old events and make them (small l) legends.

In that case you could have kept Legends. There is plenty of empty space with little or nothing written about in the 30000 year EU history. I guess i can toast myself for being right.

[Steve]

Having a consistent creative team for the entire sequel trilogy would've been a good start, instead of trying to shift it partway through, thus introducing creative whiplash.

Although I'm one of those people who actually enjoyed both Ep VII and Ep VIII despite their different tones, so my opinion's probably not in line with mainstream.

[MissKittyFantastico]

Granted I've never created a shared universe (well, once, but the Amberverse is really just a particularly convoluted in-joke) but I've mulled it over a bit, and come up with something I'd pitch, if Disney rocked up and said "Star Wars, go, one-page recommendation on my desk by tomorrow morning."

It is basically a shared universe - once they decided they were going other places than just sequential episodes - and I feel like the nature of Star Wars, historically, kind of shows you the way you need to build that model. You can't not do the Episodes, so that's your backbone, but I don't feel like you can take a Marvel approach to it - there was no way they could've done the Rey movie and the Finn movie and the Poe movie and then brought them together for Ep7, that's not how Episodes have worked in the past (TBH even though I liked the Clone Wars series it eventually spawned, I really didn't like how Ep3 dodged its work in that regard), and I don't see any reason to go changing things up now.

So you're going to do Episodes VII to IX (and ideally on until the heat death of the universe so long as they keep making money) - I think both 7 and 8 did a lot of things right (not everything) but I'd have taken Lord of the Rings as the model for the 'sequel trilogy'. Not necessarily filmed as one story (you want to get Ep7 out before too many years of production drag on) but planned and scripted as one, and like LotR did you accept certain 'weaknesses' in the structures of the individual films because it makes them come together as a stronger whole once it's complete. Nobody's hitting the panic button two movies into a trilogy when Disney's money is backing it, you don't have to worry about not having the chance to complete your story, and once it's complete nobody'll be complaining that the climax of Ep7 didn't maybe feel as 'epic victory' as Ep4. So that's your Episodes in the can.

For the Stories (ideally someone in the room will think of a better name, but let's go with it for now), I feel like Rogue One was a good first step - you introduce the audience to this new (ish, give or take the Ewok movies or whatever) facet of Star Wars at the cinema, where it is Star Wars but it's not the next Episode, but you do it strongly couched in familiar territory just to ease the transition. You don't already know Jyn and Cassian, but you know Rebels and you know the Death Star, it fits into the known story. But after that you don't go cherry-picking popular characters, there's no Solo or Boba Fett or Obi-Wan movie (unless someone gives me a really good pitch for one, you never know - in fact, bring me an Asajj Ventress outline, so long as it's not Dark Disciple).

I think your connective tissue is the Sith, and that's what you slap down on the table of the writers' room on day one and say Riddle Me This. Now I know there's been an awful lot of development of the Sith in the EU already (and if some moron put me in charge, I would go find someone who knows all that, get their input, and not go nullifying great swaths of it unless there was a really good reason why) but so far as 1-6 go, the Sith basically seems to be a long line of douchenozzles with evil sword and evil names who want to conquer the galaxy because it's there - and let's be honest, the "long line" thing is only because of some throwaway exposition in dialogue, the Sith for all intents and purposes is Palpatine, and he's pretty much the same cackling prick from day one until he gets a 7.5 from the Estonian judge for a good dive but not sticking the landing. So we're going to develop that.

What I'm imagining is, basically, Ep7 kinda-sorta as done - the details don't matter, maybe the new droid's shaped like a hedgehog and the plucky orphan fights with nunchuks, whatever - but at some point we learn something about what's ultimately behind the First Order, and it shows us that this isn't happening just because of some new dickhead with a facial deformity who wants to rule the cosmos, it's part of something bigger. So like, Snoke, but with substance - something is revealed to the audience that shows us this new threat is actually a continuation of what was going on with Palpatine, and was going on a long way before him too. Doesn't have to change much, the rest of the First Order don't even have to be aware of it, just that Palpatine and Snoke and many more besides are all part of the same thing, and it's more concrete than just the "dark side". As I say, this feels like what little I know of the Sith anyway, they've been around like a bazillion years and are always causing trouble, so we'll use that if it suits us, but what I want on the table is a concise summary of the Sith as this ancient, malevolent, group or conspiracy or entity, that keeps popping up Hydra-like in different forms, but it always the same beast at heart.

And the Episodes can mess around with that, since they're going forwards - like, maybe Snoke was the current Grand High Sith Dude and accidentally left his laptop running with himself logged in, so when Kylo killed him (before he was really ready to take his place as the next Sith in the conventional manner) he got access to Snoke's browser history and learned the full terrible truth of the Sith, which is something we haven't fully been shown before. Does he decide to follow in Snoke's footsteps like a good boy, or decide he doesn't need the Sith legacy and he's gonna be his own kind of villain? Is the Sith legacy too powerful to just step away from, even if he wants to? It'll make for fun times in the Episodes anyway, and since they're at the forefront of the Star Wars story it doesn't have to play out in a way that preserves the status quo, so it'll be exciting too.

But meanwhile the Stories are all about various folks, for whatever reasons, fighting their own fights, but the tendrils of the Sith are in there somewhere. Doesn't have to be in a big way, we don't have to have every bad guy be a Darth with a red sword - we just discover something about the Sith every time. Like if the movie's about a TIE pilot like the game, we have that creepy guy in the robes saying "In addition to your orders from the Navy, you can prove your loyalty to the Emperor by collective ten bear asses during your next mission" or whatever, we see some aspect of the Sith at work. Maybe five thousand years ago some explorers unearth a Sith holocron in a forgotten temple, and they don't know what it is, but it's like the One Ring, it messes with them and eventually they're killing each other over it.

It's kind of like Spectre but with space magic, you have a film where they have to deal with some clown with metal hands, then another where there's this hot Russian starkers in Istanbul, and then next week everything's got to be done in scuba gear, but ultimately it's all originating from the dude with the white cat. You do different genres, different lineups of characters, maybe this one's a tragedy, that one's a spy thriller, the other's a prison break - not relying on "Hey you remember this character!?", just trust that you can make a kickass space movie and people will go watch because the trailer looks cool and it says 'Star Wars' on it, and if you do it right the first couple of times audiences will cotton on that every time they go see a Star Wars movie, no matter what's actually going on in it, it'll add something, not just be discardable.

So that's it in a nutshell. Episodes go forward, and maybe change the galaxy entirely (and if you keep doing them, you can start looking at each new trilogy having its own identity and focus, just so you don't have to keep overturning the same pillars of the lore every few years), Stories show various heroes of all kinds and all eras struggling against the baleful influence of the same Sith force that's rearing its head big time in the Episodes.

[Darth Wedgius]

Star Wars is fantasy with a science fictiony setting. The big threat doesn't have to be technological, and doesn't have to be solved by blowing stuff up.

Dark Jedi powers could be raising the recently deceased as puppets of a dark council, making an unstoppable army. An army only one hero can stop.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Yes, they definitely should have taken a different approach. Having any kind of direction at all for your main story would have been a start. It's still astounding to me that in this day and age, you can acquire a property like Star Wars and somehow not have a comprehensive plan.

The plans they did have all revolved around the financial side rather than the "tell a good story" side. As we all know by now, the plan was to cash in on nostalgia first while introducing new characters to bring Star Wars into a new era. Anthology films would continue the nostalgia while the saga films and potential future trilogies would move on to new characters that they could market to rake in still more cash.

What these films have largely failed to do is build the mythology. For all their faults, the prequels did that. Four movies into the Disney era, and the universe feels smaller and restrictive, which is honestly ridiculous for a franchise like Star Wars. You get the sense that their understanding of the Force, Jedi, Sith, and all the rest is either confused or overly simple. I miss my naive days when I thought that Rey finding Luke at a Jedi Temple (after an entire movie looking for him!) would result in some kind of new canon information about the Star Wars universe.

It's not just Star Wars though. I feel like a lot of writers today are doing a pretty poor job of worldbuilding, but that could be a whole different discussion.

There's no one right answer as far as what approach they should have taken, but here's one question that I think is important- Given the story as it was told up until Return of the Jedi, where should the galaxy be thirty years after those events? What makes sense? If you answer that, the pieces start to fall into place, and then you can start improvising and incorporating your own ideas.