George Lucas planned three more Star Wars movies before he ultimately decided to retire, with Disney taking up the franchise instead.
Lucas has, over the years, occasionally discussed having nebulous ideas for his own Star Wars sequel trilogy, though nothing concrete was set in motion before he sold the series to Disney for $4 billion back in 2012. The filmmaker has also made conflicting statements over the past 50 years over whether he ever had ideas for a third trilogy of stories in the first place.
Still, Lucas has now referenced an abandoned desire to complete what has become known as the “Skywalker Saga” — all nine main Star Wars films — though Lucas has said he had to choose between creating those and working on his newly-opened museum.
“When I did this, I decided to retire from making movies,” Lucas said of creating The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, in conversation with CBS. “Which was a big deal because I had three more Star Wars to make.
“But I realized that I was running out of time,” he continued, “and I did want to make this museum, and I’d spent a lot of time developing digital technology for the movie business. You know, all art depends on technology.”
Lucas’ early plans for the Star Wars sequel trilogy changed dramatically over time, with ideas that it would feature a sister for Luke Skywalker and an ultimate showdown with Emperor Palpatine reworked into Return of the Jedi. By the 1980s, Lucas realized the sheer scale of the story, and elected to make just the main trilogy.
Of course, Lucas did eventually go on to write and direct the prequel trilogy, to greater and lesser success, but this experience reportedly soured him against continuing the Star Wars saga further. By the time of the 1990s, after nine years of production on the Star Wars prequels, Lucas sounded particularly unenthused at the prospect of another decade making movies.
“Basically what I said as a joke was, ‘Maybe when Harrison and Carrie are in their 70s, we’ll come back and do another version,'” Ford told Starlog magazine in 2002. “The thing I didn’t realize then, and that I do realize now very clearly, is that not only would they be in their 70s, but I would be in my 70s too.”
While Star Wars’ third trilogy was eventually made by Disney, again to greater and lesser success, the Mickey Mouse company still incorporated several ideas that Lucas himself has said he originated. These included plans for its story to be set around 30 years after Return of the Jedi, with an older Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher all returning. Lucas also had plans for Luke’s role to be “much more ethereal,” potentially on another plane of existence entirely, which doesn’t sound too dissimilar to where Skywalker ends up.
As part of the same interview, Lucas also defended his constant tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy, which has undergone at least four rounds of changes since its release.
