Q&As About 'Star Wars': Will Lucasfilm ever do a Star Wars movie set between Episodes VI and VII with a de-aged CGI Han, Luke, and Leia?

Many Star Wars EU/Legends fans would love to have seen films based on Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. But the window for a live-action version closed long, long ago. © 1991 Bantam Spectra & Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 

Quora member Michael Justin asks:

Will Lucasfilm ever do a Star Wars movie set between Episodes VI and VII with a de-aged CGI Han, Luke, and Leia?

And I say: 

No.

First of all, as it stands now, the technology for such a complex project is too primitive and extremely expensive, plus the results simply would not be convincing.

Just look at Rogue One: A Star Wars Story from 2016. which uses CGI technology to superimpose the likeness of Peter Cushing (who died in 1994) on actor Guy Henry (who wore motion-capture headgear while filming) to play Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin in a film set shortly before the events of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope. Ditto for the brief appearance of Norweigan actress Ingvild Deila (with a CGI’d recreation of 19-year-old Carrie Fisher’s face superimposed on hers) as Princess Leia.

The lovely Ingvild Deila. (Photo Credit: IMDb.com)

Many Star Wars fans have commented that although Rogue One is a good entry in the franchise, the use of mo-cap CGI to either recreate a dead actor or de-age a still living one (Carrie Fisher was still alive when Lucasfilm filmed Rogue One; she passed away after it premiered in December 2016) was one of the few things to pull viewers out of the movie.

The idea of making a film either set within the timeframe of the Original Trilogy or shortly after Return of the Jedi and starring the Big Three of the cast (Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford) is not a new one. In fandom, especially the vast constituency of the Expanded Universe/Legends fans, the most talked about “wish list” of projects are films based on Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy novels or an adaptation of Steve Perry’s Shadows of the Empire, a story that is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

In fact, author Perry jokingly suggested - in his introduction to Dark Horse Comics’ trade paperback collection of Shadows of the Empire - that Lucasfilm could do just that. The only caveat Perry added, of course, was that this could only be done as a 2D traditional animated film, since Mark, Harrison, and Carrie had aged quite a bit since 1979, which was when The Empire Strikes Back had been in principal photography.

The only way that Lucasfilm Ltd. can do any stories set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens with anything like the original cast are:

• A traditional (hand-drawn) animated movie starring the voices of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, with a voice actress who sounds like a 20-something Carrie Fisher as a replacement for the now-dead co-star of the Original Trilogy
• A 3D CGI animated film with the same cast requirements as the 2D hand-drawn film concept mentioned above
• A 3D CGI animated film with only Hamill returning, since de-aging Ford’s voice would be difficult unless the film was set closer to The Force Awakens than to Return of the Jedi
• A controversial recasting of all three main roles in a live-action film set before Episode VII, which would infuriate large segments of the Star Wars fandom

In any of these situations, there’s always a risk that such a project would not attract large-enough audiences and fail, perhaps even more spectacularly thanSolo: A Star Wars Story did in 2018.