Petitioning Disney For A Sequel Trilogy Is Just, Ugh

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Petitioning Disney For A Sequel Trilogy Is Just, Ugh

Change.org petitions are the pet hamsters of the internet -- just because you signed up for one doesn't mean you want more and more of them until you're drowning. Well, there's a new one up now that wants us, in light of "new" information, to petition Kathleen Kennedy and all the boss people at Disney to release the treatments that George Lucas made about 40 years ago for a sequel trilogy.

There are a couple problems with that idea. First, this new petition is coming out because of former Disney CEO Bob Iger's "new" book. I keep putting "new" in quotation marks because this book came out with plenty of time for it to be a 2019 stocking stuffer over the holidays. Anyway, in it, he talks about how Lucas had the whole 9-episode arc mapped out very, very early. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they also bought his treatments for Episodes VII, VIII, and IX. Though Iger and pals were clear with Lucas that they were under no contractual obligation to use those treatments, Lucas apparently thought there was more winking and nudging going on there than there actually was. As Iger tells it, "George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we'd gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start." So when they first screened The Force Awakens for him, he was really disappointed.

The thing is, though, it doesn't sound like they veered too far off course, at least at the start. According to a bunch of research, in Lucas' head, an elderly Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker would've been in exile at an ancient Jedi Temple on another planet, and when a young woman came seeking his help, he'd find some of his youthful vigor again as he trained her to be a Jedi. The big differences were the, well, everything else. You gotta fill 2+ hours of screen time per movie somehow.

But the thing is, do we really need that separate trilogy out there? Maybe it'd be fun to read Lucas' original thoughts, but we're going to keep getting new Star Wars content off into infinity. If Lucas really wanted his sequel trilogy to be about a passing of the torch, maybe it's time we let that be reality, and allow the torch to go to J.J. Abrams or whoever.

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