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Disney Turned Down George Lucas's Star Wars Scripts

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-enough-anthropomorphic-animals dept.

ageoffri writes: When Star Wars fans learned that George Lucas was making the prequels, most were filled with excitement and anticipation. When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying, and became disillusioned with Lucas's writing. Now, it appears Disney felt the same way. Though they bought Lucasfilm and began production on Episode 7, they weren't interested in using the scripts Lucas had already worked on. In an interview, he said, "The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it's not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens]." After what happened with the prequels, that may be for the best — but others may worry about Episode 7's plot being entirely in the hands of Disney and JJ Abrams.

6 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Good news by slapout · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As long as the plot's NOT in Lucas's hands, I'm happy.

    --
    Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
    1. Re:Good news by JeffAtl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      George, no amount of astroturfing is going to convince anyone that the prequels were good or even tolerable. You should have at least hired someone who knew who to write passable dialog.

      You were good when you first started off, but now you've been blinded by your own success.

    2. Re:Good news by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The first Transformers movie sucked badly. Really badly.

      The Transformers: The Movie is fucking awesome. It has a great story, an amazing soundtrack, and the most amazing voice cast of any movie ever:

      Peter Cullen
      Frank Welker
      Judd Nelson
      Kasey Kasem
      Eric Idle
      Scatman Crothers
      Lionel Stander
      Leonard Nimoy
      Robert Stack
      Orson Welles

      And you get to top that list off with a song by Weird Al Yankovic.

    3. Re:Good news by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree. IMO the complaints about the prequels were fueled primarily by nostalgia about the original movies, remembering the delight of seeing them as a child.

      Bro. Phantom Menace. Jar Jar Binks. Droids controlled from a single point of failure (even my non-technically inclined friends were like "wtf is that?"). You can't explain the hate of that away just by mere childhood nostalgia. That crap was awful in an absolute sense.

      I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult and wasn't nearly so enchanted.

      And neither was I (sans RoTJ).

      That shouldn't be surprising. These are all children's movies; we grew up. Lucas' movies didn't change so much as we did.

      Sorry, no. Phantom Menace can't be explained away. The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith were watchable as they portrayed Anakin's fall (sans the lingering doopey-doopey romance between emo-Anakin and hot-Amigdala and a whole bunch of other crap.)

      But Phanton Menace was some utter crap that stained the other two, and Jar Jar Binks is like the dog turd that stains the sole of your shoe that doesn't come out no matter how much you scrape it on the grass.

      You can't explain the utter fail of that to mere childhood nostalgia. You are crazy.

  2. Yay!! by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good on Disney. Lucas may be ok at imagining a story but he sucks at things like writing dialogue. That they dumped his scripts gives me hope these movies may be decent.

  3. I am say, 68% excited by jacks+smirking+reven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Couple things for the naysayers to consider though, and why I believe Episode 7 will be good (but not near the hype):

    - Abrams himself said he is a much bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. You can see that in the Trek films. They are far more "space action" akin to W than Trek.

    - Disney is the big mouse and certainly has and can screw with production they have really let the Marvel folks run their own system and it's working to great effect. The hot thing for studios these days is a more hands off approach and that's good for everyone.

    - Kathleen Kennedy is running SW and shes been around for the golden years for Lucas and Spielburg. Disney will let her and Abrams run the show.

    - Dear god the script. Both ST reboots were penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They are responsible for quite a bit of the new hollywood schlock (Look at their IMDB's). Hell you could make a case that Abrams direction is what made the new Treks at least somewhat enjoyable and not just Transformers in space (and Into Darkness came close). Lawrence Kasdan who wrote TESB is involved. Basically everyone who's had their hands on the SW script has far more talent then those two.

    And lastly my biggest hope is that this is a movie being made by a generation that grew up on SW. They had to eat what Lucas was giving them like the rest of us and should want to start anew. Every fan has thought "if i made a SW sequel..." and now some of those folks are getting to, with some help from those that helped in the beginning.

    Could it all go south? Very much so, but I am keeping restrained excitement.