J.J. Abrams Responds to Whether the Star Wars Sequels Should Have Been Mapped Out

‘Sometimes a plan is good. Sometimes a plan is bad. It really just depends.’

Wow, anyone out there have any surgical tape? I’m going to need to piece my skull back together after having my mind completely blown.

 

There should have been a plan for the trilogy as it turned out to be a mess!

 

Agreed. Everything on life should have some kind of plan. Especially a frigen trilogy for Star Wars lol

 

I think we can all agree on that.

About that zoom call- I was positively surprised on how nice and professional JJ's lighting and camera set up was for that video.

 

Made my day, thanks

 

I will say though, fair play to JJ for at least acknowledging what a mess the trilogy is and for staying off Twitter and not arguing with fans.

 

The title of this thread is false and misleading.

Why isn't it enough to just say that Abrams has shared some thoughts on making and planning franchise movies? Why the need to spin it and then make an admission somewhere in the middle that the subject of the article actually makes no reference to words that have been attributed to them in the headline.

It's also important to remember that Abrams never planned to ever make more than one Star Wars film. Which further undermines the false headline.

--- Double Post Merged, May 27, 2021, Original Post Date: May 27, 2021 ---

No Star Wars trilogy was ever planned out in any meaningful way or ever worked out as "planned".

 

This is true but that doesn't change the fact that the Sequel trilogy had no plan from the beginning.

The Prequel Trilogy was and although the OT perhaps wasn't, George Lucas wrote all three films so there was that continuity throughout the trilogy. Something the Sequel Trilogy didn't have.

 

There is continuity in the sequel trilogy. The only deviations that I can see in what other people have presumed Abrams and Johnson wanted or expected the next movies to do. (Which means that the narratives that the trilogy wasn't planned and that JJ and Rian chucked out each others respective plans for the trilogy have to co-exist somehow)

The prequel trilogy wasn't planned except in the sense that Lucas said that he planned to make Episodes I-III and he did that. He later admitted that he got to Episode III and realised he'd been playing in his sandbox for the first two movies and left the last movie to do all the storytelling. The planned trilogies myth is one of the biggest red herrings in Star Wars.

The idea that everything is all planned is attractive to some people. But it just doesn't stack up in reality. It's especially unsafe to apply it to Star Wars when Lucas has continually revised his expressed views on what it is he actually achieved with Star Wars.

 

He doesn't acknowledge anything. His quote just meanders around and never says anything specific. Who is arguing with fans?

It seems to me a great deal of "online reality" that fans believe is true is the result of consuming too much sensationalist journalism, videos, and social media. It's created to generate controversy when there is none. JJ's answer to the question never mentions Star Wars directly. In fact, he said he's learned to appreciate having a plan more during covid because unexpected changes.

Any time people online don't like something they have to gravitate towards something. During the prequels it became popular to complain about CGI. That became a popular tool to beat up films people didn't like. Given JJ's quote about how things can change after you have a plan he could just a easily be talking about the challenges the entire project faced after Carrie passed away. It's odd to me that one of the biggest issues with the entire trilogy is the fact they lost one of the main members of the cast before the last film.

 

I bet these guys are available for consultation on movies.

 

They always had the same plan though.

Created needlessly complex contraptions > Miss with every shot of automatic gunfire > Punch or throw the last two bad guys in slow motion.

 

If you say so.

I don't think either JJ or Rian chucked out each others plans as there weren't any to chuck out. Both were given the green light by Kathleen Kennedy to tell their own story with neither supposed to return for Episode 9. Make your film and let the next person deal with the sequel.

George Lucas knew over 3 films he wanted to tell the story of how Anakin became Darth Vader, I don't doubt that he had issues in working that out but that was the basis of the Prequel Trilogy. I don't believe for one second that when Kathleen Kennedy and JJ started the TFA that they had a clue how the ST was going to end.

 

Yeah, that’s what I was goofing on. It’s a total non-statement.

Having a defined end goal in mind before you start is great in that it keeps you on track. But that track can also keep you from exploring other paths as they pop up. There’s an equal potential for either help or harm. So, have a plan, but be willing to change it if needed.

That’s some solid advice, but certainly not any kind of revelation. And certainly doesn’t mean what the title of the article seems to think it does.

Sorry, statements like that give me the giggles

 

That's not a plan. That's an objective. One that was predetermined by one line of dialogue in A New Hope.

If you make the reasonable assumption that Lucasfilm knew they wanted to tell a story about how the generation after Vader's off-spring deals with the past coming back to haunt them and the galaxy then you can say that the ST has as much of a plan as the prequels did.

 

Brilliantly said!

People often don't realize that having a plan doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvise, change, or exploration. It's a matter of when and where that occurs. If I have a plan in the outline, but I'm noticing the characters (either because of who the actors are, or because of who the characters have become) are going off script, then I might explore that in the pre-public (writing, drafting, editing, etc) phases. But - at least for me - that desire for for exploration should be done before a director says "action."

The fact that the Star Wars films didn't have time to do this was a huge problem. (But, admittedly, so was the fact that the trilogy really didn't know where to go.)

An outline is more like a good garden plan. You have a vision of what things will look like, and you know where everything needs to go. There's consistency, a guiding touch, and accountability. If things aren't looking up to shape, it's up to the gardener to decide what the problem is and how to fix it. Is it because something needs to be pruned? Or should we let those wildflowers bloom and see how they accompany the plan? Stuff like that. But the gardener isn't starting from scratch.

 

Call it what you like but Lucas knew what the endgame was going to be, you need an objective in order to make a plan and predetermined or not that was the whole point of the PT.

Not really and I don't see how you can compare the two. The PT was written and directed by the creator of trilogy it is based off of, his creation with his characters. To say that George Lucas didn't have a plan for the PT to me seems bizarre, if anything the PT was the most planned out of the three Trilogies.

Compare that with the ST which was initially supposed to be written by three different people who were given free rein to tell their part of a trilogy with no plan from the start.

 

He did acknowledge it in another recent interview. Rian Johnson.

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