Mark Hamill Reveals George Lucas' Star Wars Ending
Warning: There are spoilers in this article.
The way George Lucas intended the Star Wars franchise to play out changed dramatically between Return of the Jedi and The Last Jedi, according to a new interview with Mark Hamill. Luke Skywalker dies at the end of Episode Eight, The Last Jedi, becoming one with the Force after giving the entire Resistance time to escape. But, as Mark Hamill told IGN, this isn't how the story was supposed to go.
"I happen to know that George didn't kill Luke until the end of [Episode] Nine, after he trained Leia," Hamill told IGN. "Which is another thread that was never played upon [in The Last Jedi]."
The thread to which he refers is a plot line involving Luke training his sister, Princess Leia, on the ways of the Jedi-a potentially course-shifting development for the franchise. Instead, Luke serves briefly as Rey's teacher in The Last Jedi.
According to IGN, Hamill had seen the outlines for Lucas' Episodes Seven through Nine back in the '80s. Although Lucas never made those, Hamill says he had the story planned out.
"George had an overall arc–if he didn't have all the details, he had sort of an overall feel for where the [sequel trilogy was] going–but this one's more like a relay race. You run and hand the torch off to the next guy, he picks it up and goes. Rian didn't write what happens in 9–he was going to hand it off to, originally, Colin Trevorrow and now J.J. [...] It's an ever-evolving, living, breathing thing. Whoever's onboard gets to play with the life-size action figures that we all are."
For the better part of four decades, Star Wars was primarily in the hands of Lucas. Having created the franchise in 1977, he shared writing credits on Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. When the franchise returned in 1999 with the prequel trilogy, Lucas retained sole writing credits on Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith (Attack of the Clones is co-written by Jonathan Hales).
When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, Lucas handed his story off to one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. From there, J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt told the seventh chapter of the Skywalkers, The Force Awakens, Rian Johnson wrote Episode Eight, The Last Jedi. Abrams and Chris Terrio, the screenwriter behind Argo, Justice League, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, share writing credits on Star Wars Episode Nine, which is due out Dec. 20, 2019.
We'll never know for sure how Lucas' sequel trilogy would have played out, but given the quality of his prequel series, maybe that's for the best.
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