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After 3o+ years I put it all in the perspective of TODAY’S audience and what it wants. Add in PC, the Disney Co. politics and its need to profit and fill its Disney stores with ‘MOICHANDIZE” as Mel Brooks put it-and I have no hope of a mythic epic from Disney. Their target audience is 5-17. Older, adult fans are the ‘nostalgia audience’. Look at it as a business prospect. The product is a film but what if it were 4.5 BILLION dollars worth of chicken? Would your company try to sell chicken cordon bleu to the 5-15 year olds ow would you make more profit selling chicken nuggets? You’re not getting gourmet food from Mc Donalds and you’re not getting a moving epic from the Mouse House. It’s not what they do.
Speculation? I actively dislike the Solo character and could never see the Royalty/Criminal thing working. Hit and run, yes, long term-no. IF they were smart Solo’s death will be the big dramatic moment. We are ALL assuming too much. 30 years later they all could have gone their own way. Why assume Han and Leia married, had children? They could have children from other relationships that meet up years later.The main three could have NO children, and the ‘new generation’ could be newly found Force users.

What if the Princess ended up with Lando and the black guy is her son? What if the girl is hers by another man and the black guy is Han’s son from some space-bimbo or a relationship that predates SW? Think today’s ‘multiculturalism’ and satisfying every faction. Disney has gotten very liberal!

Bottom line, I can’t see them worrying too much about the ‘old’ fans and what they want. We are a limited commodity. They have to start a new market of kids they can milk for 20 years Move the geezers off- on screen and in the audience- and get a new generation hooked. I don’t see our kind of SW movie happening. Times have changed-the culture and audiences WORLDWIDE have changed. The original SW would flop today. Dark, cynical, evil-based films make it now and even the biggest hits are on DVD within months.
I have a bad feeling about this.

I of course have a bad feeling about this too, because I think they should have let Star Wars alone.

But at least one (and maybe both) of us will be very unhappy in December 2015!

I’m a lawyer now, but my background is in screenwriting. Clearly that didn’t work out very well financially, so take my comments for what they are worth. And Han Solo is perhaps my favorite film character ever, so we have big POV differential there.

But here’s my thing about the new trilogy: The arc of the first three films led up to an ending in Jedi was more or less a “and they lived happily ever after” moment for the Big Three. Luke redeemed his father and became the first of the “new Jedi.” We learned that Leia was strong in the force (and was not actually royalty at all, but Darth Vader’s daughter) at the same time that the obstacle for Han and Leia’s relationship (Luke) was removed. Which means the only two characters set up to possibly continue the Skywalker bloodlines could continue the bloodline.

If the next movie opens with major, major events that change the status quo we all saw at the end of ROTJ (like the ones you positor other one’s I’ve heard, like Luke goes Dark) and those events have all happened OFFSCREEN in the intervening years, they have a storytelling problem: they’ll have to TELL us about it, and not SHOW it happening. Telling and not showing is one of the worst things you can do as a screenwriter. I also think they’ll have a lot problems with suspension of disbelief problems if they just tell us that the character traits that developed, the growth that occurred over the arc of first three films, and the relationships between the Big Three at the end of Jedi were not in some way permanent and fractured in the intervening years. I don’t think it’s just the nostalgia audience like us who would not buy in: I know a lot of kids who are just as steeped in Star Wars mythology and as fond of these characters as the nostalgia generation.

So I think Abrams and Kasdan need to be very, very careful about how they play with the Big Three. Personally, I’d like to see the Big Three sidelined as quickly as possible in favor of the next generation. We should have seen the most compelling moments of the characters of Luke, Han, and Leia’s lives onscreen already.

So I’m kind of hoping Kasdan and Abrams remember screenwriting 101 and if big things happen to the Big Three, they happen onscreen, and not in the intervening years(although Abrams wrote “Regarding Henry”, which is one of the worst things ever, and Kasdan wrote that horrible movie “Dreamcatcher”, which may have been the second worst thing ever). So...we’ll see.

But one thing is for sure, ClearBlueSky. You and I are both big time nerds. :)