Star Wars Rumor Suggests Abrams And Johnson’s Films Were Meant To Reboot Franchise

While Star Wars: The Force Awakens may have been criticized as a rehash of the events of Star Wars: A New Hope, the film successfully reinvigorated the franchise, bringing Star Wars back to life after a decade of silence. But what if Disney didn't really want to revive the Star Wars franchise? What if the Mickey Mouse House wanted to reboot Star Wars instead?

According to this new rumor spread by Gary Buechler (via Bounding Into Comics), a source has told him that Lucasfilm actually planned to reboot the Star Wars franchise with the help of both The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams and Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson. Apparently, Abrams was meant to create a canon reboot by introducing new characters in the franchise. Johnson was supposed to kill the original characters off.

"Rian was not just randomly writing a story nor was JJ. JJ's job was to create an in canon reboot like the 2009 movie and introduce the new characters. Rian's job was to kill off the originals and then you were supposed to not notice it was rebooted," the source told Buechler, "Each was given the outline to make it and what the points were. So now you know why. Disney did not want to pay a license fee and by end of it, all looked different and was new copyright under the old name. They even changed the Falcon to be different. But the orders were in the end to leave nothing original."

This whole report sounds ridiculous, of course. Disney purchased the rights to Lucasfilm way back in 2012, so the Mickey Mouse House didn't really need any kind of licensing fee for the sequel trilogy. Besides, both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi introduced new characters and killed off older ones.

In The Force Awakens, we were introduced to a whole new set of heroes and villains including Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac). The film also ended up killing Han Solo (Harrison Ford).

The Last Jedi also introduced a couple of new characters like Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) and Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). The film ended up taking the life of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).

It doesn't look like Disney wanted to reboot the Star Wars franchise at all, but to help ease the films into a new direction.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker premieres December 20, 2019.

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