It feels like pretty much every Star Wars project comes along with a report that Disney have had to send a desperate transmission across California: “Help us George Lucas. You’re our only hope.”
Lucas being spotted on the set of Solo: A Star Wars Story had fans theorizing that he was taking creative control, there were reports that he was being brought in to fix Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and just in the last few days we’ve heard that Lucas might be writing and executive producing the Rogue One Cassian Andor show. Now, it seems, you can toss Obi-Wan onto that list.
We’ve been hearing for a while now that Obi-Wan is facing a long delay amidst reports of script problems and apparently, Lucasfilm has turned to George for help. And while the rumor of him returning for the aforementioned Rogue One series has since been shot down, we’re told that this situation is a little bit different.
According to our sources – who said that [SPOILERS] would be revealed as a traitor in Rise of Skywalker and who told us about the Rey/Palpatine twist in the film months before it released – this isn’t exactly an official return to Star Wars. That’s still something that could happen down the road, we’re told, but unlike the Rogue One news, George isn’t coming back in any official capacity here.
Instead, he’s just advising on the scripts and on the best direction to take the character’s story in. And that would certainly make sense, given that Lucas wrote and directed Obi-Wan across the Original Trilogy and the prequels, and if anyone knows how to tell a story on Tatooine, it’s him.
Still, it’s worth remembering that George doesn’t have the Midas touch. While the reputation of the prequels has been considerably rehabilitated over the last few years, being kind of interesting doesn’t make them actually good. One of the things I was looking forward to most about Obi-Wan was that it’d give Ewan McGregor some material worthy of his acting skills, which were largely squandered under George “Faster. More Intense.” Lucas’ direction.
However, given how unenjoyable The Rise of Skywalker turned out to be, I’d rather have Lucas’ bad yet bizarre storytelling, dialogue and direction than the nearly unintelligible mess of unresolved plotlines and nonsensical character arcs that Disney’s Sequel Trilogy ended up as. It would certainly be surprising to see George involved in Star Wars in anything other than an unofficial advisory role going forward, but with the franchise suddenly looking vulnerable after a couple of high profiles failures, who knows what will happen?
In any case, it sounds like right now, he’s definitely at least lending some assistance to Obi-Wan and given that this intel comes to us from the same sources who also said Transformers is being rebooted, Disney is making National Treasure 3 and John Cena is playing Vin Diesel’s brother in Fast & Furious 9, we have no reason to doubt it.
