One person who is positively grumpy about "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is George Lucas. Even though he’s $4 billion dollars richer having sold Lucasfilm to Disney, earlier this week he explained that he walked away from the franchise due to the constant outside criticism he received, and the inability to be experimental with the form. Now, in a new chat with CBS This Morning, the director shifts gears a bit, and says that once Disney decided not to use his treatments for the sequels, he decided to step away.
"The issue was ultimately that they looked at the stories and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans,’" Lucas said. "People don’t actually realize it’s actually a soap opera and it’s all about family problems – it’s not about spaceships. So they decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing so I decided, ‘fine…. I’ll go my way and I let them go their way.’"
It’s a bit amusing to hear Lucas describe the "Star Wars" saga as a soap opera — and certainly it has elements of melodrama and tragedy — when he’s the one who spent years adding even more spaceships to battle scenes in the original trilogy, and digitally enhancing the explosions. And if Lucas sounds like a spurned lover, it’s not a surprise.
The filmmaker describes his exit from "Star Wars" as a "break up," adding, "You just say ‘Nope, gone, history, I’m moving forward.’"
If there’s one empty seat on December 18th at your local multiplex, it might be the one someone was saving for George Lucas.