The huge amount of turnover in filmmakers and the highly-publicized setbacks faced by almost every Disney-era Star Wars project has fans thinking that the studio don’t have a concrete plan in mind for the future of the franchise, and are content to make things up as they go along with no long-term goal.
Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy has been made the scapegoat for the continued woes of the beloved sci-fi series, and a lot of people believe that Star Wars would be in much better shape if she wasn’t the one steering the ship. There’s already been speculation that Kennedy could be on her way out as a civil war brews behind closed doors, and a new rumor claims that there are now three options on the table to determine the future of Star Wars, all of which would mark a major change to canon.
Admittedly, this latest report should be taken with a grain of salt given that it comes from the delightfully-named Doomcock, who also claimed that Lucasfilm were actively withholding George Lucas’ cut of The Rise of Skywalker from the public, but some of the information does match up with what other outlets have been saying lately.
The first option is said to be a soft reboot of the entire Sequel Trilogy, using the Veil of the Force to introduce a time-travel element into Star Wars to reset the timeline that would result in the Lucas Cut of The Rise of Skywalker marking the official end of the trilogy, in what would reportedly give Luke Skywalker a much more satisfying character arc.
“The first scenario is a kind of soft reboot of the sequel trilogy and is by far the worst option on the table. In this scenario they use the Veil of the Force to go back in time and warn Luke not to try and kill Ben Solo,” Doomcock explains.
The second would again use the Veil of the Force as a major storytelling device but would wipe the Sequel Trilogy from canon entirely by having Palpatine definitively killed following the events of Return of the Jedi and establish The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker as an alternate reality that takes place outside of the main timeline. This would reportedly lead to a Luke Skywalker solo movie, with Doomcock explaining:
“I’m told they are contemplating a new Luke Skywalker movie set 10 years after The Return of the Jedi. Set in The Mandalorian timeline.”
The third and final option would see George Lucas return to the fold and shoot his own Sequel Trilogy after the most recent movies disregarded almost all of his ideas and story points, and while this may seem like a stretch, we have heard in the past that the Star Wars creator was interested in the possibility of concluding his own nine-movie arc.
Though it seems unlikely that Disney and Lucasfilm would simply disregard a trilogy that made them well over $4 billion at the box office just because a lot of fans didn’t like it, the future of Star Wars on the big screen has never been as cloudy and unclear as it is right now, meaning that nothing can be completely ruled out just yet.
