A couple of months later he told Bloomberg that “ from a storytelling perspective they had a lot of potential.” Soon after the sale was announced, the trades began reporting that Arndt had written the treatment, with Vulture pegging it around 40 to 50 pages. In a conference call with the press to discuss the acquisition, Disney CEO Bob Iger mentioned that part of what the company was buying was a “ pretty extensive and detailed treatment for what would be the next three movies, the trilogy.” He added that they felt “really good” about the treatment. Then the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney was announced at the end of that month. As far as I can tell, George was not part of this retreat. In October, they were part of a week-long retreat at Big Rock Ranch*, part of the Skywalker Ranch complex, where they brainstormed the new trilogy. Michael Arndt was approached in May and asked if he would be willing to write the trilogy and agreed to tackle at least the first.Īt some point in the fall of 2012, two writers were brought in to help Arndt break the story: prolific producer/screenwriter Simon Kinberg and writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi with George. The outline he created in early 2012 was about a 14-year-old girl named Taryn who set out to become a Jedi Knight. He had consulted his notes from the 70s and 80s when writing the prequels and likely did the same here. Likely in early 2012, George sat down and put pen to paper on the sequel trilogy. A new Star Wars trilogy, based on a story by the maker himself, would make the company much more attractive. Lucas began to seriously consider making the sequel trilogy when he decided to retire and wanted to secure his company’s future without him. In this article, I will attempt to explain why some members of the creative team, especially George himself, would claim that the original treatment was discarded. This uncertainty has been caused by conflicting quotes from the people involved.

Nearly since that moment confusion has reigned over whether or not that treatment was used for the films, especially Episode VII - The Force Awakens. In October 2012, when Disney announced the acquisition of Lucasfilm and the Star Wars IP, they also revealed that they had bought a treatment for Episodes VII-IX in the space opera from George Lucas himself.

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