Disney Threw Out George Lucas' Episode VII Story Before J.J. Abrams Came On Board

Even though George Lucas has said that he always conceived Star Wars to span a trilogy, and then wanted to go back and tell the first three chapters of the story with prequels and finish it up with a third trilogy, there is plenty of evidence to support the opposite, such as Luke and Leia's potential love affair turned sibling relationship. But no matter when he conceived of the story to follow Return of the Jedi, the fact remains that he did come up with an idea for a sequel, but Disney didn't want it after they bought Lucasfilm.

Recently, an interview had George Lucas Star Wars Episode VII involvement laid out as being completely non-existent, long before the film even was called The Force Awakens, and it's mostly because the studio didn't want to embark upon the story outline that Lucas already had planned in his head. Find out more below!

First of all, let's recap what Lucas told Vanity Fair this past week:

"The issue was ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans.' 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.'

They weren't that keen to have me involved anyway. But at the same time, I said if I get in there I'm just going to cause trouble. Because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore. All I would do is muck everything up. So I said, 'Okay, I will go my way, and I'll let them go their way.'"

That sounds a little bitter, but at the same time, since Lucas was sick of the criticism he faced with the prequels, I'm sure he's happy to be avoiding all of that with a continuance of the sci-fi saga in someone else's hands. Lucas compared his choice to let Disney move on without his involvement to your average break-up:

"When you break up with somebody, the first rule is no phone calls. The second rule, you don't go over to their house and drive by to see what they're doing. The third one is you don't show up at their coffee shop and say you are going to burn it... You just say 'Nope, gone, history, I'm moving forward.'"

And that's where J.J. Abrams has come into play as Disney's new boyfriend. And the director confirmed that Disney had already thrown out whatever ideas Lucas had for Episode VII and beyond by the time he came on board the movie. Abrams told EW:

"Before I showed up, it was already something that Disney had decided they wanted to go a different way with. But the spirit of what he wrote, both in those pages and prior, is everything that this movie is built upon."

While we may not ever find out which direction Lucas would have taken the Star Wars saga, there are plenty of fans happy to see the franchise out of his control. While we owe Lucas all the credit in the world for creating this universe that we love so much and doing some incredible things as a filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s, he was unrestrained and unchecked when he made the prequels, and the franchise was no longer fueled by innovative collaboration that made the original trilogy so great.

If anything, I would say that it's the prequels went too far with all the shiny spaceships and even moreso with the number of lightsabers, and fans wouldn't have been quite as excited about new films with Lucas on board. But we don't need to play the blame game anymore, because Lucas isn't involved with Star Wars anymore, and you can tell he's just fine with that.

But to counter his thoughts about what Disney wanted to do with Star Wars, it's clear that The Force Awakens isn't just about spaceships at all. It seems to continue the legacy of the Skywalker family, as Kathleen Kennedy has said it would, and by association will likely still have plenty of family problems for our characters to deal with in sci-fi soap opera fashion. After all, Rey doesn't know where her parents are, so that's a pretty big family problem.

We'll find out if Star Wars: The Force Awakens stays true to the spirit of the original movies while moving into new territory when the film arrives next month.