Q&As About 'Star Wars': Why do you think Lucasfilm decided not to adapt Timothy Zahn's Trilogy into movies?

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The current edition of Heir to the Empire, which was originally published in 1991 by Bantam Spectra. Cover art by Tom Jung. © 1991, 2014 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 

On Quora, Matt Swanson asks:
Why do you think Lucasfilm decided not to adapt Timothy Zahn's Trilogy into movies?
My response:
There are several reasons why Lucasfilm never had any intention of adapting Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command from novels to movies.
The main reason, and the only one that truly matters, is that George Lucas clearly did not want to do so. In the late 1980s, which is when Lucasfilm Licensing was given his go-ahead to revive the moribund Star Wars franchise after being in a post-Return of the Jedi coma, the creator of the saga was emerging from his post-divorce funk and thinking about making the long-awaited Prequel Trilogy.
From his perspective, allowing Lucasfilm Licensing to hire a diverse group of writers that would create a series of interconnected stories that continued the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio, and even Lando Calrissian was a win-win situation for the company. It would, for the time being, free Lucas to concentrate solely on developing the digital tools to make his David Lean-like Prequel Trilogy in an epic scale that the Original Trilogy lacked. A literary Expanded Universe with a post-Episode VI also had the benefit of liberating Lucas from having to worry about a Sequel Trilogy at all, especially when Harrison Ford was busy with other projects, including Working Girl, The Mosquito Coast, and Witness. Carrie Fisher was likewise otherwise engaged, coping with her drinking and drug problems, battling with her weight issues (look at her in When Harry Met Sally…. as Marie; she’s funny and engaging as Sally Albright’s best friend in NYC, but she looks nothing like Princess Leia in the Tom Jung cover for Heir to the Empire), and she was focusing on her writing career. And Mark Hamill was enjoying his work as an actor on stage and as a voice actor in animated projects.
As I have said on previous answers concerning the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Lucas played an insignificant role in its creation. He did interact with Timothy Zahn during the prep stage of the latter’s Thrawn Trilogy, but it was mostly limited to okaying the basic concept, approving (and later adding to the canon) the name Coruscant for the former Empire’s capital world, and laying down strict rules that prohibited any in-depth exploration of the Rise of the Empire era, the Sith, or the pre-Original Trilogy timeline in general.
But aside from allowing Lucasfilm Licensing to basically do its own thing so long as the writers did not contradict the movies, George Lucas stepped aside and focused on what he considered to be his mission: to make the Prequel Trilogy and complete the six-film cycle he later dubbed The Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.
Heir to the Empire was published in June of 1991, eight years after the premiere of Return of the Jedi. Over the next two summers, Bantam Spectra published the other two volumes in the Thrawn Trilogy, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command.
In 1994, Lucas began the long process of writing the screenplay for the film that was eventually released as Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In the interim, Harrison Ford had already accepted the role of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan in Philip Noyce’s adaptation of Patriot Games, so even if Lucas had gotten a team of writers and directors to make an Heir to the Empire film while he concentrated on his own Star Wars films, it would have required one of two things to cope with Ford’s unavailability:
  • A massive rewrite of the story that deleted Han’s subplots
  • A recasting of the role.
Neither choice, I think, would have pleased devotees of the Thrawn Trilogy.
It seems to me that questions such as this one reflect a great deal of ignorance about the filmmaking industry, how popular franchises deal with “expanded universes” and canon, and how difficult it is to make adaptations that will please not just fans of X book (X here standing for any popular book or series of books, whether they are The Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, Jaws, Fifty Shades of Grey, or the James Bond novels), but the wider, non-Star Wars Expanded Universe reading audience as well.
Realistically, there was no way, short of making an animated version of The Thrawn Trilogy in the late 1990s, that Lucasfilm would have adapted Zahn’s novels (or any of the other EU works) into movies. Lucasfilm Ltd. was not then a huge corporation with inexhaustible resources, and most of its film production staff was either focused on developing the tools Lucas needed to put his vision on screen, not just for the Prequel Trilogy but also for the 1997 Special Edition of the Star Wars Trilogy, or they were helping other directors, including Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, create movies such as Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump.
Also, let’s set aside the pesky realities of Lucasfilm’s real-life limitations for a second and ponder the what-ifs of a filmed Thrawn Trilogy.
Zahn’s books are among the very best EU works. I have the original hardcover editions from the early 1990s, and I’ve always thought that of all the EU Star Wars authors, he is the one who best captures the essence of the iconic Original Trilogy’s characters. He is so in tune to the movies, in fact, that he even uses Lucas’s OT trope of always beginning a new installment in or near an Imperial Star Destroyer. As a contemporary reviewer of Heir to the Empire famously observed, Zahn’s books are so evocative of the beloved Star Wars trilogy that you can almost hear John Williams’s score as you read them.
While it is true that The Thrawn Trilogy has a cinematic vibe, it is much too complicated to distill into a trio of two-hour films. There are far too many characters and situations in the novels as it is, and even the best scriptwriter would have to make difficult choices, such as:
  • What are the most important story arcs that need to be kept in the script?
  • What characters and subplots do we need to leave out?
  • Can we make Characters X and Y a composite character?
  • Can we delete Plot Point A in order to keep Plot Point B?
Trust me when I and other Star Wars fans say this: If Lucasfilm had adapted the Thrawn Trilogy into live-action films, it would have been extremely divisive. Devoted fans of the books would have quarreled with other fans about how Grand Admiral Thrawn and other of Zahn’s characters were cast and portrayed onscreen, while non-EU fans would have hated the films because they didn’t match their headcanon for the post-Battle of Endor galaxy.

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