George Lucas says he had three more ‘Star Wars’ films before retiring
by The Washington Times AI News Desk · The Washington TimesGeorge Lucas says he still had three more “Star Wars” movies in mind years after he stopped directing, plans he ultimately gave up when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012.
The 82-year-old filmmaker made the disclosure during a wide-ranging interview with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, timed to the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. The $1 billion, 300,000-square-foot institution, co-founded by Mr. Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, opened to the public Tuesday.
“I had three more ’Star Wars’ to make,” Mr. Lucas said, according to a report on an extended, web-exclusive version of the CBS conversation. He said he chose to walk away from the franchise because he wanted to devote his remaining time to the museum rather than another decade of filmmaking.
Mr. Lucas had continued developing his own version of a sequel trilogy in the years after “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” before selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion. According to the same report, elements of those plans, later described in “The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005,” reportedly involved Darth Maul rising through the galactic underworld and Luke Skywalker rebuilding the Jedi Order. Mr. Lucas has never publicly confirmed a final version of that story, and accounts of the specifics have varied.
Since the sale, Mr. Lucas has stepped back from directing altogether. His most recent story credits — 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and 2015’s “Strange Magic,” an original animated musical unconnected to “Star Wars” — came before and after the Disney deal, respectively, but neither extended his hand in the franchise itself.
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