The original Star Wars movies were made without a firm plan in place (beyond what was in George Lucas' head), and Lucasfilm took that same approach with the sequels. Unfortunately, that boiled down to us getting a trilogy of movies that seemed to be based around the clashing visions of two filmmakers - J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson - who had very different ideas for the franchise.
Recently, Collider caught up with Abrams and asked the filmmaker whether he thinks the final three chapters of the Skywalker Saga would have benefited from a plan being in place from the start.
"I’ve been involved in a number of projects that have been that have ideas that begin the thing where you feel like you know where it’s gonna go, and sometimes it’s an actor who comes in, other times it’s a relationship that as-written doesn’t quite work, and things that you think are gonna just be so well-received just crash and burn and other things that you think like, ‘Oh that’s a small moment’ or ‘That’s a one-episode character’ suddenly become a hugely important part of the story."
"There are projects that I’ve worked on where we had some ideas but we hadn’t worked through them enough, sometimes we had some ideas but then we weren’t allowed to do them the way we wanted to," Abrams continued. "I’ve had all sorts of situations where you plan things in a certain way and you suddenly find yourself doing something that’s 180 degrees different, and then sometimes it works really well and you feel like, ‘Wow that really came together,’ and other times you think, ‘Oh my God I can’t believe this is where we are,’ and sometimes when it’s not working out it’s because it’s what you planned, and other times when it’s not working out it’s because you didn’t."
He added: "You just never really know, but having a plan I have learned – in some cases the hard way – is the most critical thing, because otherwise you don’t know what you’re setting up. You don’t know what to emphasize. Because if you don’t know the inevitable of the story, you’re just as good as your last sequence or effect or joke, but you want to be leading to something inevitable."
These comments are definitely a little vague in relation to Star Wars, but perhaps that's a sore subject for the filmmaker who has really come under fire since The Rise of Skywalker was released in 2019.
It definitely sounds like Abrams would have appreciated having a plan to work from, though, especially as Episode IX was primarily focused on damage control to make up for what many fans didn't like in The Last Jedi (revealing that Snoke was a Palpatine clone and retconning Rey being a nobody, for example).
Do you think Lucasfilm needed a plan with the Star Wars sequels?