Lawrence Kasdan Wants to “Start Fresh” For His Star Wars Spinoff, Won’t Pull from the Expanded Universe

The Empire Strikes Back scribe Lawrence Kasdan is one of the writers assigned to those recently confirmed Star Wars spinoffs. We don’t yet know who Kasdan’s movie will be about—Boba Fett, Han Solo, and Yoda have all been rumored, though it could be someone else—but whoever it is, he’s kissing anything from their Expanded Universe storyline goodbye.

Via the L.A. Times:

Kasdan would not confirm reports that the spinoff films would center on iconic characters Han Solo, Boba Fett or Yoda, but said he wasn’t focusing on his previous scripts or on the extended “Star Wars” universe in his approach to writing the new film.

“I’m trying to start fresh,” he said. “There are certain pleasures that we think the saga can bring to people that they’ve been missing, and we’re hoping to bring them that, and at the same time, have them feel that it’s all new.”

That makes sense to me. The EU is a large, unwieldy beast, and as much as I love certain aspects of it (*cough*RogueSquadron*cough*) starting with a clean slate is probably for the best. Sure, Kasdan could, if the situation called for it, pick and choose aspects of the EU to include. But it’s so interconnected that doing that you’d likely have to A) overload on exposition, which does not a good movie make, or B) change/omit things from the story so much that you might as well start from scratch anyways.

(Granted, that might not be the case if Kasdan’s doing a Han Solo backstory movie, as that takes place and was written before stuff started getting super-complex in the EU… so he could still pull from that if he were doing a Han Solo backstory movie. But. Moot point.)

Granted, Kasdan was only commenting on his movie, not the future of Star Wars in general. The other films could still pull from the EU. But I don’t think they will, or maaaybe they’ll keep some characters and ditch the plotlines. Going with brand new stories for a brand new era of Star Wars would keep things accessible to fans who haven’t read the EU and, even more importantly, it’d also keep the writers from being restricted by other peoples’ storylines.

This might be blasphemous of me, but I’d be fine with Disney/LucasFilm ditching the EU completely. As long as the movies are good, I genuinely do not care. I love Mara Jade, Rogue and Wraith Squadrons, the Thrawn trilogy. (Not the Jedi Academy trilogy, though. That can go away.) But even if they’re “written over” by other movies, we’ll always have the books.

What do you think? Would you be OK with LucasFilm abandoning the EU? Or would that cause you to reach Kyp Durron levels of outrage?

(via: /Film)

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