A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 gro...

What is the reason Disney got rid of so much good Star Wars content by making the Expanded Universe legends? There are several reasons why Lucasfilm ( not  Disney) decided to “get rid of” much of the Expanded Universe. First, if Lucasfilm was going to make new films, it needed to have full creative license to do so without being beholden to stories that other writers had written between 1978 and 2014. This includes the Marvel Comics issues that  were not  adaptations of the Original Trilogy movies, Alan Dean Foster’s  Splinter of the Mind’s Eye,  the Brian Daley  Han Solo  trilogy, and the various novels and comics published by Bantam Spectra, Dark Horse Comics, Bantam Skylark, Del Rey Books, and other licensees. No self-respecting screenwriter or film director, much less the Lucasfilm Story Group, would have wanted to wade through a thicket of superficially connected but wildly uneven stories. Second, I hate to break it to you, but  n...

Cover art by Mathieu Laffray. (C) 2009 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On December 16, 2009,  Dark Horse Comics published Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, a 420-page hardcover collection of the comics adaptations of the 1991-1993 three-book cycle of novels by Timothy Zahn. Written by Mike Baron and featuring the art of three different artistic teams, The Thrawn Trilogy collects issues 1-6 of Heir to the Empire, issues 1-6 of Dark Force Rising, and issues 1-6 of The Last Command in one volume for the first time. In 1991, after a five-year "dry spell" in which no new Star Wars fiction saw print, Bantam Spectra published Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire, which raised interest in that galaxy far, far away to a level that had not been seen since the release of the "last" of the films, Return of the Jedi . Later that same year, Dark Horse Comics obtained the Star Wars comic-book license, and a merging of interests seemed inevitable. ...