George Lucas has revealed what he would have done for 'Star Wars' Episodes VII-IX

Star Wars is one of the 20th century’s most defining movie franchises and obsessive fans have poured over every single detail for years.

And the man at the helm of the Star Wars universe for decades was legendary director George Lucas. He triumphantly brought A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to cinema screens in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to critical acclaim and blockbuster success.

Then, from 1999 to 2005, came the prequel trilogy. They were… less well-received. Actually, a lot of fans absolutely hated them.

When he was asked in 2012 whether he’d make any more of the films, he told The New York Times: “Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”

Fair point. And so the Star Wars steam train continues to hurtle through time and space with a seemingly endless series of films overseen by Disney and without Lucas anywhere near them.

But fans might be interested to know that Lucas, 74, has some ideas on what he would have done with the latest sequel trilogy if he were involved - indeed, legend has it that he had the story for the first nine films all worked out before A New Hope was filmed, choosing to begin with that as the film most likely to be initially successful.

“[The next three Star Wars films] were going to get into a microbiotic world,” he said, according to the new book James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction.

“But there’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”

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He added: “If I’d held onto the company I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”

Lucas has hinted at these mysterious, all-important Whills before. According to Thrillist, the concept dates back to George Lucas’s early scripts for Star Wars 1977. In the annotated version of the script, released in 1997, Lucas wrote:

“Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else; there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody wiser than the mortal players in actual events. I eventually dropped this idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force. But the Whills became part of this massive amount of notes, quotes, background information that I used for the scripts; the stories were actually taken from the Journal of the Whills.”

Personally, we’d love to see Lucas make just one more film. He can cram in every last idea he ever had to make the ultimate smorgasbord of Star Wars goodness. 

(Images: Getty)