Lucasfilm Exec Confirms New Star Wars Trilogy Very Similar to George Lucas’ Concepts

Star Wars fans are some of the most difficult audiences in the world to appease, with some claiming The Force Awakens was too familiar for their liking while The Last Jedi veered too far off course from their expectations. A go-to defense to discredit the new trilogy of films is to explain how they deviate from George Lucas’ supposed original concepts for a follow-up trilogy, yet Lucasfilm Story Group member Pablo Hidalgo pointed out on Twitter just how similar many elements of the new films are to Lucas’ concepts.

With Lucas having never written entire scripts for all three films in a sequel trilogy, it’s tough to know exactly how far he fleshed out the films, potentially merely conjuring some concepts of characters, themes and narrative beats. Out of all the people on the internet, it’s safe to say Hidalgo is one of the most familiar with Lucas’ plans, given his status within the studio.

One of the first things Hidalgo pointed out was confirming to one user that the events of The Last Jedi are in line with Lucas’ concepts, the big difference being the timing of these events.

Hidalgo’s confirmation of these timeline adjustments came as a result of one user pointing out that, as revealed in the book The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Lucas always intended to craft a film involving Han Solo and Leia’s son turning to the Dark Side, killing Han and having killed many of his fellow students at an early age. Additionally, Rey convincing Luke to come out of hiding was an element Lucas toyed with, with all of these events originally to have been handled in the hypothetical Episode VII.

Some users, thinking that they were the ultimate authorities on the matter, claimed that events in the Star Wars Legends novels and comic books more accurately reflected Lucas’ original ideas, which Hidalgo refuted.

Hidalgo attempted to remain diplomatic, with one of the points he found most difficult to ignore being that scripts were never created, so any mention of them invalidates arguments related to these fictional pieces of literature.

Some of the arguments surrounding Lucas’ ideas could have stemmed from comments made by Mark Hamill about the direction of the new trilogy.

“What I wish is that they had been more accepting of his guidance and advice,” Hamill told Metro. “Because he had an outline for [Episodes] VII, VIII andIX. And it is vastly different to what they have done.”

It’s also possible that, depending on when Hamill learned the details of those films, Lucas could have deviated from what he initially revealed to the actor.

The Last Jedi is in theaters now.

[H/T StarWarsNewsNet]