When George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, and Star Wars along with it, all of his sequel trilogy plans were tossed aside. Disney decided to start from scratch with their own series of movies, which have proven to be pretty divisive. That’s led some to seek out more information on what Lucas originally intended, and while we’ve heard bits and pieces occasionally we’re learning more now thanks to James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction series. Turns out if you really loved all that midichlorian shit you would have been pretty happy.
“[The next three ‘Star Wars’ films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. But there’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force,” Lucas said.
“Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we were just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in…We’re vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”
Lucas has talked about the Whills before, and honestly it’s such a bad idea that I can’t bother going into it. Look here if you want more, but basically what you’d have gotten was such a detailed explanation of the Force that it no longer would have been mysterious or remotely cool.
And Lucas clearly knew the kind of reaction this story would have gotten. The stories were that he was so beaten down by the negative reaction to his prequels that he no longer had the will to keep on making Star Wars movies, hence the sale to Disney. And in these comments he pretty much confirms those feelings…
“All the way back to – with the Force and the Jedi and everything – the whole concept of how things happen was laid out completely from [the beginning] to the end. But I never got to finish. I never got to tell people about it. If I held onto the company, I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”
I’ve grown to liken George Lucas to legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont. They both created something tremendous that we loved when we were kids, and as we grew older we kept wanting them to come back and tell those stories again. But every time they did it turned out to be a disaster. Lucas gave us the crappy prequels nobody likes, and Claremont has repeatedly returned to the X-Men and when he does the stories feel like they were dreamed up decades ago, which they probably were. In short, maybe it’s a good idea to let the past stay in the past. Oh hey, that was the entire point of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, wasn’t it? That Rian Johnson…such a prophet.
