Talking About 'Star Wars': Was killing off Han Solo part of Disney's plan to have the audience focus on a new set of characters for the next generation of Star Wars fans?

The Blu-ray packaging for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. © 2015 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Buena Vista Home Entertainment

No.

First of all, (and I’m tired of explaining this over and over), The Walt Disney Company does not, nor did it ever have, a plan “to have the audience focus on a new set of characters.” If anyone had such a plan, it would have been Lucasfilm, the Disney-owned subsidiary that is responsible for actually making Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

Second of all, creating a new set of characters for the Sequel Trilogy was always going to be in the cards, as the window for making a post-Return of the Jedi trilogy closed sometime between 1983 and 1994, partly because of George Lucas’s divorce from Marcia Lucas and Star Wars burnout, and partly because when Lucas decided to go back to big-budget filmmaking, he chose to make the Prequel Trilogy instead.

Meanwhile, as Steve Perry noted in his foreword to the Shadows of the Empire graphic novel based on his 1996 book, the original cast was growing older - so much so, in fact, that Perry acknowledged that the only way Lucasfilm could have adapted Shadows for the big screen was to make it an animated film.

So even if George Lucas still owned Lucasfilm and changed his mind about making a Sequel Trilogy, he still would have had to come up with a Star Wars: The Next Generation scenario, since Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford had aged and were now in their sixties and early 70s.

Look. Carrie Fisher died a few days after the premiere of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in December of 2016. Kenny Baker, the original R2-D2, had died that August. Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), died in 2019. Harrison Ford, a hard-working actor who appreciated the opportunities that opened up for him after Star Wars, is not overly fond of Han Solo and had asked, as long ago as The Empire Strike Back’s shoot, that the character be killed off, nobly sacrificing his life for Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. (George Lucas adamantly refused to kill Han off, and it is widely believed that the only way that Kathleen Kennedy, Lawrence Kasdan, and J.J. Abrams convinced Ford to reprise the role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was by promising to kill Han off once and for all.)

Realistically, the only way that the Sequel Trilogy could have gone forward was the way it has been made: with a new and younger cast of leads, with the surviving original cast performing in visible but supporting roles