Star Wars creator George Lucas has revealed in an interview with Cinemablend.com that Disney has to all intents and purposes dumped the story treatments for StarWars Episodes VII, VIII and IX that they were included as part of the US$4 billion-plus (Dh14.7bn) deal to buy the Star Wars franchise in 2012.
Lucas told the website: “The ones that I sold to Disney, they came to the decision that they didn’t really want to do those. They made up their own. So it’s not the ones that I originally wrote.”
"We thought from a storytelling perspective they had a lot of potential," Disney chief executive Bob Iger had told Business Week in 2013. This coming from Disney's chief cheerleader, and a man who the previous year had been charged with sounding convinced that John Carter was a great movie. As the article points out, this could hardly be described as a ringing endorsement.
Fans who are still traumatised over Lucas' efforts on the prequel trilogy, meanwhile, seem largely pleased that Lucas' treatments have, at best, been used as a rough basis by the eventual screenwriters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, or Episode 7, JJ Abrams and Empire Strikes Back screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. One commenter on the original Cinemablend interview, w16521, noted that: "He lost it years ago. With new people at the helm, the series can return to greatness."
cnewbould@thenational.ae
