En vanlig kritik till den sjunde Star Wars-episoden menar att filmen är lite väl lik A New Hope och saknade fantasi, något som Star Wars-pappan George Lucas tydligen höll med om när det väl begav sig. Disney-bossen Bob Iger, som i memoarerna "The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO Of The Walt Disney Company" reflekterade över just denna reaktion och hur han hanterade relationen med Lucas, som ju var allt annat än glad när han insåg att Disney inte hade några som helst planer på att använda hans ursprungliga idé om att utforska mikroskopiska midi-chlorians och mytomspunna väsen som Whills:
Early on, Kathy [Kennedy] brought J.J. [Abrams] and Michael Arndt up to Northern California to meet with George at his ranch and talk about their ideas for the film. George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren't using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations.
The truth was, Kathy, J.J., Alan [Horn, Disney's film chief], and I had discussed the direction in which the saga should go, and we all agreed that it wasn't what George had outlined. George knew we weren't contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we'd follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded.
Så här reagerade han på filmen när de väl visade den för honom:
"Just prior to the global release, Kathy screened The Force Awakens for George. He didn't hide his disappointment. "There's nothing new," he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, "There weren't enough visual or technical leaps forward."
Detta var dock medvetet enligt Iger, som ju ville knyta till fansens nostalgi för originaltrilogin:
"We'd intentionally created a world that was visually and tonally connected to the earlier films, to not stray too far from what people loved and expected, and George was criticizing us for the very thing we were trying to do."
Iger erkänner dock att han kunde ha skött det hela bättre, då Lucas kände sig "bedragen" av det hela:
"Now, in the first meeting with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we'd gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start."
Vad tycker du om riktningen som de nya Star Wars-episoderna har tagit? Längtar du efter The Rise of Skywalker?
"Du! Du är inte så kreativ, stumpan!"
Tack Gamesradar/Reddit