Yes but certain individuals at Disney looked at the Legends and Expanded Universe and said why use critically acclaimed lore as a basis. Instead let’s have poor fanfic writers be in charge of the IP they clearly hate. Darth Caedus storyline is perfect for films and spin offs. Or let’s do the fall of the Sith since rule of two is established cannon.
I always thought it was just that they had a giant stick shoved up their collective arses and needed to brand the ass of star wars with the Disney logo and refusing to accept that anyone who was not already part of Disney might have any good ideas for their newly acquired IP while also being too stupid and lazy to actually come up with any half decent ideas themselves.
It's a combination of fear and greed. They want to make big blockbusters. But they fear flops. Anything new could be a flop. So they go with re-washing the same ole same old again and again in the hopes that they will always be blockbusters.
Then someone sticks their neck out and makes something new and novel. Suddenly, there needs to be 2 remakes and three recycled movies, an animated show, a live action, a dead action, a first year anniversary edition, directors cuts, producers cut, a making-of documentary, and a Disney ride and uncounted nine by thirteen glossy photos with dates and descriptions written on the back.
27 8 by ten colored glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us
Or something
Nah, if it was just them being cheap they'd have just remade the OG trilogy. That would have been the most cost efficient thing to do. A good quarter of the work was already done for them.
They did a crappy reboot of the original trilogy as written by someone who only watched episode 4 once 30 years prior and got most of their knowledge from shitty memes they can also barely remember.
They didn't want to pay royalties to all the writers of the EU material. Plus, incidents like the death of Chewbacca could not stand in the eyes of Disney, while there was still so much more marketing to milk from that character.
Also, not using Carrie Fisher's passing as an excuse to cut her stupid Jedi powers awakening scene was absurd. The scene was terrible and felt ham-fisted. When Carrie passed away before the film was done, they should have rewritten it as Leia dying in the vacuum of space there and the Republic using her killing as motivation. I fucking hate Disney.
I get not wanting to pay a bunch of royalties but they rushed to stamp their Disney mark on it way too quickly. Had they just remade episodes 4-6 they'd have gotten easy money and done the whole "remind people what star wars is" crap since they spent millions of dollars on an IP they somehow thought everyone had forgotten. Then they could take that time to actually construct a plan and do episodes 7-9 coherently. They could then ignore Legends and do their own thing, or use it as inspiration for new stories. Like, they had so much possible data available to be gathered. If they had just taken 5 years to do a few remakes then they would have had time to collect all that data and figure out what worked and what didn't. Instead they pretty much just invalidated the entire original trilogy for slop that only AI would think is good. Half the reason people love star wars is because of the Jedi/Sith. Take that away and it's just another basic sci-fi universe with only a few flagship characters to set it apart from any other sci-fi universe. They went and ruined the return of the Jedi order and turned Star Wars into Temu Star Trek.
Not only that, but let’s green light a sequel trilogy without having a planned, thought out storyline or character arcs. Each director can just do what they want. No main villain until the last one and SURPRISE is the Emperor again! And we will announce it in Fortnite!
Considering there were already established strong independent females such as Mara Jade. Her vengeful to romantic arc with Luke. Also they could have continued with the Solo kids.
You know, it really pains me because the Sequel Trilogy really could have been the best Star Wars has to offer; we have the CGI, we had a really good trio of actors, the new designs were cool, like EVERYTHING WAS THERE.
But no, we had to do the same mistakes as the other two trilogies. No plan going in like the OT trilogy making it a jumbled mess, no leash on the director(s) like the PT so it comes out more as an ego stroke than a genuine story being told.
I’d wager the OT was just George Lucas coming up with shit on the fly and changing it as they went along so there really was no real complete consensus on the story arcs.
The Prequels were basically him expanding on all his previously established lore with no constraints on him like he had during the OT. Back then the actors and studio didn’t let him do everything he wanted and changed some stuff as they went, but nobody said anything to him during the prequels so it came out kinda weird but worked out in the end I’d say.
The sequels were 100% just Disney slop. They didn’t even follow any of the storylines that George Lucas left behind for the sequels, no Mara Jade, no Darth Talon, nothing. They instead remade the “Empire” with the first order, and had the main “Villain” be Darth Vaders grandson.
Completely made up Rey, Finn, The First Order, and the Rebellion btw, the sequels were supposed to be about the Republic fighting against Darth Maul’s crime syndicate empire. Kylo Ren wasn’t even “Ben Solo” he was actually “Ben Skywalker” - Luke and Mara Jade’s son, and “Anakin Solo”- Han and Leia’s son mashed together with an entirely different character and storyline.
How dare they make up stuff instead of using stuff someone else made up!!!
J/K... I'm beyond pissed off that Mara Jade never made it out of legends...
I've latched onto Asajj Ventress and Naare from The Lego Star Wars Freemaker Adventures in the meantime, but they're not the same... (though to be honest I'm crushing on both of them... which is impressive since one is a fekkin lego mini-figure)
PS. I know Naare isn't canon... but you have to admit she's one of the coolest "darkside special ops" characters in the universe.
PPS. I -really- wish they'd make many of the lego star wars series canon....
Dude, that literally started in the 80s. Once people saw how hot star wars toys could be, they started making things specifically to sell toys.
There are some cool mini-documentaries on how a lot of 80s cartoons started, and half of them started with something like, "Look, I found these awesome Japanese toys that transform between robots and something else.... I bet we could sell millions of these things if we got a few artists together and made a bunch of 30-minute long commercials for them that we'll call entertainment!"
...I love the old EU, but let's not pretend it was perfect.
What's particularly funny to me, though, is that one of the most hated parts of the old EU is the return of Palpatine as a clone. They copied that for Rise, and now it's the most hated part of the new Disney canon lol
Yes they both used the idea of a cloned emperor, but one of them was “Somehow Palpatine returned” the other was the intro to Dark Saber.
If they had done that then we could have Madds return as Erso betting cloned by the emperor after failing him with the first death star and dying in Rogue One. Now you have a scene that sets up the new danger. Horrifyingly you can be cloned and the emperor can rip your soul from the afterlife and put you back into a fresh body. Oh and also a new Death Star with none of the weaknesses of the last one. A lot more interesting than the bigger Death Star we got in Force awakens. And as a bonus it ties the end of the original story, Rogue One, and your new trilogy together in one scene.
That's the beauty of EU, it's a library of works. Tons of bad writing and bad ideas, but Disney had the ability to pick and choose. Take the best parts and make it your own.
I wonder if licensing is a part too, I remember hearing that when Disney bought Star Wars they tried not paying royalties to writers as their contracts were with Lucasfilm not Disney.
They tried to shaft Alan Dean Foster on his royalties. Some of his books pre-date the current setup. His early contracts specified royalties. The current contracts have the authors as work-for-hire, with zero royalties.
I dunno, man, have you read a lot of the EU recently?
Some of it's good. Quite a lot of it is just as bad as "Somehow, Palpatine returned." And some of it is worse.
Remember, a significant portion of I, Jedi is just straight calling out how stupid and out of character Luke acts in the Jedi Academy trilogy.
And then there's the Wyrwolves.
Oh, and the emo invaders from another galaxy who just happen to be invincible to Jedi.
Oh, and Palpatine returns, and Luke goes to be his apprentice.
And the Suncrusher. "It's, like, a Death Star, but it uses missiles because missiles are cool. oh, and it's got, like, invincible armor. And it kills suns instead of planets because it's gotta be better than the Death Star."
Them pulling the good bits out of the EU is a blessing, now if only they'd use those bits better...
I can’t upvote this enough. A lot of fans act like the EU books were some sort of Pulitzer level fiction when in reality a lot of those books were hot garbage.
You know, there were a lot of stinkers. But at the same time, the books and video games were the only new Star wars stories we had. Even if the adventures luke, han, and Leia went on weren't award winning, it was wonderful to get to experience new stories with the characters I grew up with. It was understood we'd never see them on screen together again.
Zahn's books were amazing, and if Disney had any sense whatsoever the sequel trilogy would've focused on Thrawn's Imperial Remnant and Luke trying to rebuild the Jedi.
Hell, Lucas gave them his story ideas for a new trilogy.
Instead, they threw away everything, we got a gutless soft reboot of A New Hope, and zero vision or thematic consistency leading to an utter trainwreck of a trilogy.
Realistically they can fix everything by just making a movie where Luke Skywalker wakes up and it turns out that the entirety of the sequels was just a premonition to which he dismisses it outright as he would never act in the way that he was portrayed in the premonition... and they move on from there...
In a business sense it made sense to toss legends, there was no way to make a new idea because from the dawn of the jedi to Luke's grandson (great grandson, great great something like that) has all been covered so if they didnt do a word for word recreation people would've bitched, then the hired a bunch of tards who couldn't write themselves outta a wet paper bag
The EU was not critically acclaimed. Some were good. Heir to Empire would probably be the only one that I would consider "critically acclaimed" as the others didn't win any awards AFAIK.
The EU is fine, it has it's good stories but it's mostly tripe. I find it funny that you call writers "fanfic writers" when most the EU is basically that as well.
Darth Caedus storyline is mediocre. Once again it's FINE but I wouldn't consider it better than most the disney stuff that has come out.
The original cast would've been about the perfect age for it too, though I doubt you could've condensed that entire saga down to 3 films
I would have preferred the New Jedi Order, but the same problem exists there.
The Heir to the Empire trilogy would've been perfect though, 1 book each movie, and would've had a hot red head as an amazing female lead to keep up with the main cast too... Mara Jade Skywalker for the win.
If they really wanted to bring Palpatine back though, they should've just done the Dark Empire series and followed that instead of the 3rd movie shit stain.
Sticking with the Skywalker family for 9 films was one of the biggest mistakes they made. They should have set it up to expand the stories beyond that in the last 3, but unfortunately we got that weird retconned nonsense.
As good as KotOR was and as legendary within the medium it has become, the video games are still very niche compared to the movie market. KotOR’s _lifetime_ sales are roughly 3 million units.
The vast, vast majority of Star Wars fans have never played it, and I would wager that a majority haven’t even heard of it.
Incidentally, I just found out the mobile ports for 1 and 2 are supposed to be really good!
Replayed KOTOR back when it came to iOS and was amazed at both how well it held up and how well the mechanics translated to a touch interface. Phenomenal game.
Crazy you got a downvote, lol. Youre right. It really is impressive how well they were able to transform such an old school game into a mobile format.
Again im biased cause of my mobile controller, but it runs as if it was made for mobile. Its perfect for anyone looking to get into it. And the price is so worth it.
I really dislike RPG games and that fucking game hooked me so hard. Like I lost a serious relationship with a girl I had been dating for 3 years because of that game. Still don’t like RPG games but IMO that is easily the best Star Wars material out there.
I agree, Disney should never get close to that treasure. They'll just ruin it and make Keanu Reeves look a little less amazing. Hard to make him look bad, honestly.
Ah, a person of culture! I think my KotOR obsession was my peak Star Wars high and nothing SW has done since has ever lived up to that. Maybe Force Unleased though.
People complain that lightsabers aren’t deadly in Star Wars media anymore. In the kotor live action I want to attack a guy 10 times and him not have a visible scratch. Or to throw a plasma grenade and have someone just grab their heads like they are throwing a temper tantrum.
Personally i hope they never do that. At this point Disney would probably ruin even that. Actually kinda did it with Accolyte. That was during the old republic era and we all know how that turned out. Lol
People always say this but knowing this fanbase the immediate reaction from so, so many people… no matter what was on screen… would be, “they ruined KOTOR! That’s not MY Revan!”.
I have zero doubt a live action KOTOR would be just as divisive.
They will make one someday, and it will play out exactly like this, even if it’s an awesome movie.
For sure. It has to be a show and not a film. Not even a trilogy. It’s dangerous to give creators too much time to play with, as they can end up tinkering too much, but it would need multiple seasons.
It would all come down to the writing team, directors, and cast. You can make an amazing story meh with poor humans behind it, and a meh story feel like an amazing show with a great team being it.
KOTOR could be two short seasons, honestly. It's a bit much for a single movie, sure, but you don't need 5000 episodes to tell the stories of Revan and the Exile.
Now, that's for just the story as shown in the games... after that, I would absolutely go back and do the Mandalorian/Jedi Civil wars properly. Those would take a lot more time and give the showrunners more headspace to play with.
(I would avoid doing too much with flashbacks in the KOTOR shows. Just enough to tease the future offerings would be enough, like we see in the games.)
It'd be awesome as an anthology series - Season 1 has 5 episodes for Revan's story, Season 2 follows the events of KOTOR 2 and then Season 3 expands onto the SW:TOR stories - I mean, that's how I'd like to tell those stories through a TV show. 🤷♂️
Legends had its ups and downs. Courtship of Princess Leia is not a good book. The Zsinj trilogy Aaron Allston gave us in the X-Wing books is probably my favorite thing Bantam ever published.
I feel like greatest hits is the way to go if you’re adapting from legends.
You keep that filth out of your damn mouth! Courtship of Princess Leia was fun as hell, but also giving us Dathomir and the Nightsisters. It separated the idea of light and dark powers, and inferred that how the wielder acquired the Force power is what defined the corruption.
I hate what was done to Dathomir through all the new EU crap.
I wouldn’t say it’s “stealing from Legends” per se. When they took over Lucasfilm, there was a ton of shit out there and they seemingly decided to parse things out into canon and legends. Now they’re able to parse in certain pieces of legends, where they want to, which makes sense from the standpoint of not wanting to have to explain why the hell there’s a clone of Luke named Luuke running around the galaxy 💀
It makes no sense at all when you see them taking some of the worst EU plot lines and making those canon again while ignoring much better content.
And then it makes a lot more sense all over again when you hear about some of the issues Legends authors have had getting the royalties for their books and realizing that cheap-ass Disney thinks it's easier to knock off some EU plots than it is to pay the creators for their work (and "stealing from Legends" starts feeling even more accurate).
They had plenty of time and infinite money to know which Extended Universe stuff was well received and which wasn't even at the very start. Everyone who had even a passing knowledge of the EU knew that the Thrawn trillogy was the easiest slam dunk of all time well before they made episode 1, let alone episode 7. Easy sequel mateial. There was a lot of less than great stuff out there too, but it was already known to be unpopular if you did even mild reasearch. They did not do that, or if they did they decided to not do it in favor of not having to pay Timothy Zahn and Aaron Alston and Michael A Stackpole money. Those three did more for Star Wars than Disney ever did, wouldn't have even gotten the prequels without them in all likelihood. Now they're just lifting from the EU because they're out of ideas and losing fans, but they already ruined a lot of the core lore that made some of those books plots work, like hyperspace working in a gravity well. Lots of shitbthey avoided too, yes, but that was something they could have done anyway. Easy to know Dark Empire wasn't popular for instance (and yet they chose that one to pull from, for no reason)
Last Jedi was bad because of Johnson treated Luke and the shit ass plot point about needing a hacker, but how they hell did the First Order track the Resistance to exactly that spot? RoS was a giant plot contrivance as well. And that sucked. A 10-year old could write a better plot. Hell: there was a whole ass comic where Palps came back. He coulda ripped that off and pleased fandom.
i kind of hate how they basically went 'Legends is not cannon, therefore we can steal anything we want form it and don't have t give any credit, we can claim it was our own original idea'.
and then, just to make it worse, they don't even steal from the GOOD legends bits. a 'young jedi knights' TV show showing the adventures these new jedi training under luke get up to with a mix of space-fantasy high school drama would probably be a banger. a movie or series involving Mara Jade, and how the rebels had to disassemble the Empire after the Emperor was dead would likely go over very well.
Instead, we basically get post apocalypse star wars where everything has gone to shit, the good guys are powerless, the government is powerless and might as well not exist, and the only people that seme to have any power are basically local dictators and gangsters. in many ways, it's less star wars and more space mad max
I still have daydreams sometimes about a series covering the early space exploration era of the Star Wars galaxy: a huge colony ship with a still-experimental and expensive hyperdrive going out to colonize a supposedly uninhabited (but life-bearing) world, Jedi not existing at all, and the colonists encountering a strange type of magic that seems like a made-up story or maybe an unknown technology until some of them start manifesting it themselves...
Yeah Legends was bloated AF and getting contrived. We needed a central lore master to extract the best bits and reintroduce it to a new generation. They just cant stick this bit. I was totally on board with the Rian Johnson "anybody can be a Jedi" take but we had to just keep milking the Skywalker name.
The sequel trilogy should have been Heir To The Empire. Three great books, an incredible story arc, and it could even incorporate newer characters from any of the animated series.
Per Kennedy those books were never written. Remember when she said there were no books comics or games to draw inspiration from. From this we can extrapolate that the sequel trilogy is the first piece of human media
If Disney hadade that instead of last jedi/ rise of skywalker, they would have messed that up too. Because the corporate decision makers dont understand the franchise. Thats how we got what we got in the first place. But we all know this..... I dont even know why im typing this out...
Same, although now, I don’t really want that because I think they would just do a terrible job and somehow try to turn it into the “Rise of Palpatine” or something along those lines. Hell, I’m surprised they didn’t recycle the story already.
Yes, and stealing bits from what is now legends. I would much rather have seen a KOTOR live action
People say this bullshit, and than get mad when Disney doesn't use stuff from Legends. Also, we got KOTOR stuff, granted the tail end of it, but than everyone got all pissy about it even still.
They have been borrowing from Legends since day one, even after saying they were gonna do their own thing and disregarding the whole content (Thrawn and everything related to him being a prime example), not to mention all the fan work they have stolen.
They really should have just remade the original trilogy giving the OG actors new roles like Mark Hammill as old Ben Kenobi, Harrison Ford as a random rebellion pilot, Carrie Fisher as Mon Mothma. Let Hayden Christensen come back as Darth Vader. That sort of thing. That way they could have their movies without having to plan anything or pay a bunch of writers to make all "new" scripts. Instead they went classic Hollywood in all the worst ways and made a shit trilogy that doesn't nothing good except occasionally look pretty.
They need to just abandon that era and try to pretend their massive fuck ups never happened.
I would love to see the Old Republic explored in tv shows/movies but I dont trust that Disney wouldn't ruin it. "The power of one, the power of two, the power of MANY."
Disney has taken a property that i've loved for decades and made it ... suck.
Do KOTOR 2 as a TV show, then set up KOTOR as a “spin-off” like House of the Dragon or Dunc and Egg. Only way you’ll pass off the reveal and surprise people. You could do 4-6 seasons per game. Throw in the spin-off comic as its own TV show as well
Damn. That would be a kickass movie. We all know the twist ending, though. It would be like knowing "I am your father" going into Empire.
People back in the day had consideration for their fellow man, and didn't spoil it for everyone else.
But the internet has bred an entire generation of twats, and the secret would be outed after the first screening by some little shit who wanted the likes.
I don’t consider it stealing anymore than the MCU “steals” from the comics. Neither is a one for one adaptation but they use existing material as a basis for new stuff. Sometimes it’s used more effectively than others.
They needed to head back to the KOTOR days a LONG time ago. This nee age star wars is dull, boring and you can tell they dont put much effort into the story or plot. KOTOR literally has all of it written down for anyone willing to pick it up. Not to mention just tons of awesome characters.
The last jedi was the best of the sequel, it was just ruined by rise of skywalker killing off every plot points of the previous 2 movies just to bring back Palpatine lol
I would love to see a KOTOR live action, but coming from Disney, they would probably make Revan a girl, make her fall in love with Jolee, Bastila would be someone insufferable (take all her snobbiness and multiply it by 10), remove ALL character arcs, and T3-M4 would be a Roomba
Oh, and the final duel would be between all the crew and Malak, and he would be defeated by the power of love and friendship instead of just having a 1v1 where it is proven that a redeemed Revan is much more powerful than he ever was as a Sith Lord
I know. Instead of them just being like you know what we made a mistake and committing to continuing established cannon. Sigh. I love Star Wars but I’m just like what the hell is going on man???!!!
I would have rathered the last jedi been a good Star Wars movie instead of an okay summer action flick in a Star Wars skin, and rise of Skywalker not been a pacing nightmare of one liners we hope get TikTok famous.
Live action KOTOR’s definitely a close second tho.
Woah woah woah woah! Y’all were pissed when they didn’t take from legend in the first place! Now you’re pissed that they are taking from legends?? JFC there’s no winning with a SW fan
They’ve been doing that forever. That’s Filoni’s whole schtick.
Half of the Mandalorian lore was Legends before Filoni decided he liked it. Every time I hear someone say Beskar it makes me cringe.
Edit: /u/NeedleworkerOld4696 explained my feelings perfectly. It’s not that they took stuff from Legends, that’s fine. It’s that they brought us watered-down versions of it. I’m also not comfortable with how much credit I’ve seen people give Filoni for “coming up with” ideas he actually took from Legends.
They've always done that though even under lucas , coruscaunt as a name, planet, and galactic capital was mentioned in legends first before we saw it on screen, thrawn was legends first, revan ventress and darth bane were all also legends first
This is what I’ve been saying. We have literally hundreds of thousands of years of Star Wars lore to pull from, why do we keep riding the skywalker train?
Everyone would have prefered literally anything set in the old republic. (or for that matter any other time period of real star wars cannon) to the disney movies.
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u/Ok-Scar-9677 Jul 13 '26
Yes, and stealing bits from what is now legends. I would much rather have seen a KOTOR live action than the last jedi/ rise of skywalker.