Why George Lucas Was Apparently Disappointed With 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'

While George Lucas helmed four Star Wars films, including the prequel series in its entirety, his vision was soon replaced by director J.J. Abrams' for The Force Awakens, as the sequel trilogy began after Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney in 2012.

And according to Yahoo!, although Lucas let it known what direction he wanted the new series to go in, things didn't go how he wanted. As noted in Bob Iger's new memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO Of The Walt Disney Company, the Star Wars Iger was "bitterly disappointed" with the result, which he believed simply re-jigged the story from his first Star Wars film, A New Hope.

An excerpt from the memoir reads, “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 chairman], 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.”

“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. He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars. 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.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the last in the current trilogy, hits screens on December 19th. We're excited to see what the film has to offer.