George Lucas Had Three More Star Wars Movies? George, You Cannot Tell Me This Now

George Lucas, I was having a perfectly normal day until you decided to casually tell CBS that when you retired from filmmaking, you still had three more Star Wars movies to make. Thanks, George. You have inadvertently reminded me that one of the reasons KazooWatch exists in the first place is because Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker made me so angry that apparently the reasonable long-term response was to build an entertainment website where I could eventually give it the CRAP rating it deserves.

I realize that sounds excessive, but have you seen The Rise of Skywalker?

During an extended CBS Sunday Morning interview tied to the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Lucas discussed why he ultimately stepped away from directing. He said retirement was a major decision because he still had “three more ‘Star Wars’” films he could have made, but he felt he was running out of time and chose instead to devote himself to the museum and the rest of his life outside filmmaking. The timing makes the comment especially striking: the Lucas Museum officially opened to the public in Los Angeles on September 22, 2026, after 17 years of planning.

Now, before anybody starts imagining three completed scripts sitting in a drawer somewhere at Skywalker Ranch, that’s not really what we’re talking about. Lucas had been developing his own ideas for Episodes VII, VIII and IX before Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, and those ideas evolved over time. What is clear is that another Lucas-led sequel trilogy existed at least in concept before the sale, and Disney ultimately chose a different creative direction.

And this is where my initial reaction gets inconvenient, because for approximately five minutes, I wanted to blame George Lucas for all of it.

I Am Not in the “Rian Johnson Ruined Star Wars” Camp

Here’s where I probably lose some people: I liked The Last Jedi. Not every part of it, and certainly not every joke or every trip through Canto Bight, but I loved what Rian Johnson was trying to say about the Force.

The movie doesn’t end with Luke Skywalker, Rey or another conveniently important member of a famous galactic family. It ends with a kid on Canto Bight, a nobody living at the bottom of this enormous universe, casually pulling a broom toward himself with the Force and looking toward the stars. That image meant something to me because after decades of religious, spiritual and mythological ideas running underneath Star Wars, Johnson seemed to be taking the saga toward an incredibly simple conclusion: the Force doesn’t belong to one family.

You don’t need the right parents. You don’t need royal blood. It’s bigger than the Skywalkers. It’s in Rey, it’s in that kid, and it’s in people whose names we don’t know yet. The Force connects everything, which is something Star Wars had been telling us almost from the beginning.

For one brief moment, I thought the sequel trilogy was finally going to let go of the idea that this entire galaxy somehow had to keep orbiting one family.

Then J.J. Abrams came back.

Never Mind. Apparently It Was About the Bloodline Again.

Suddenly Rey needed an important grandfather, and not just any grandfather. Palpatine.

The Emperor whose death helped complete Darth Vader’s redemption and close George Lucas’s original six-film story was suddenly back at the center of everything. Somehow.

That’s where The Rise of Skywalker loses me. This isn’t an argument that Abrams can’t make a good movie, because he clearly can, and it isn’t even an argument that The Rise of Skywalker has nothing entertaining in it. My problem is with what the movie retreats from.

The Last Jedi had opened the door to a Star Wars universe where greatness didn’t require genealogical permission, and then the next movie sprinted backward through it. Rey wasn’t nobody. She was somebody. Palpatine wasn’t finished. He was back. After a trilogy that briefly suggested Star Wars might finally move beyond the Skywalkers, Rey ends the saga by choosing the name Skywalker.

I nearly threw something.

Unfortunately, I Can’t Really Blame George for That

This is the part where reporting ruins a perfectly good rant.

George Lucas didn’t write The Rise of Skywalker, and he didn’t design Disney’s sequel trilogy. He had his own ideas for what Episodes VII through IX could have been, and Disney chose not to follow them. That doesn’t mean Lucas’s version would automatically have been brilliant, either. Over the years, various concepts connected to his sequel plans have surfaced, and some of them sound fascinating while others sound extremely George Lucas.

There were ideas involving Luke rebuilding the Jedi, Leia rebuilding the Republic, Darth Maul, the criminal underworld, the Whills and a much deeper exploration of the nature of the Force. Some of that sounds terrific. Some of it sounds like exactly the kind of thing Star Wars fans would have spent the last decade yelling about anyway.

George is still George.

But whatever his trilogy became, it would at least have come from the guy who understood what larger story he believed he was telling. That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Star Wars Didn’t Need George Lucas Forever. It Needed a Destination.

I don’t buy the easy version of this argument where Disney bought Star Wars and immediately destroyed it. Disney-era Star Wars also gave us Rogue One and Andor, and there has been excellent work in this universe since Lucas left.

My problem with the sequel trilogy is more specific: three movies were asked to finish one of the biggest stories in modern popular culture, and they never felt like they had agreed on what story they were finishing. Abrams started something, Johnson challenged it, and Abrams returned and challenged Johnson’s challenge. By the end, The Rise of Skywalker was trying to conclude a nine-film saga while also settling an argument between the two movies immediately before it.

That’s an impossible way to land the Millennium Falcon.

Nearly fourteen years after selling Lucasfilm, Lucas is now casually reminding us that he once intended to tell his own version of what happened next. Would it have been better? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe Lucas would have made another masterpiece. Maybe we’d all be sitting here screaming about Whills and microscopic Force creatures instead.

We’ll never know, and that’s what makes the comment sting.

What we do know is that The Mandalorian and Grogu brought Star Wars back to theaters on May 22, 2026, after the franchise’s long theatrical absence following The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. For a series that once turned opening night into a cultural event, that gap alone says something about how dramatically the relationship between Star Wars and the movies has changed.

Lucas didn’t owe us another decade of his life. He is 82 now, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art represents a project that took 17 years of planning before finally opening its doors in Los Angeles this week. If the man who gave the world Star Wars decided he wanted to spend the rest of his creative life doing something else, he had every right.

I can’t even really be mad at him, which is irritating because I was enjoying being mad at him.

But George?

You had three more Star Wars movies?

You couldn’t have just kept that one to yourself?

Some of us are still trying to get over Palpatine.