Even before Disney acquired Lucasfilm back in 2012, George Lucas had been working on three new STAR WARS movies, and when Disney purchased the company, they also purchased Lucas' outlines for these new movies. In Disney CEO Bob Iger's recently published memoir, "The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company," he stated that although they decided that they needed to buy them, they "made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plot lines [Lucas had] laid out." As we know, Disney didn't use George Lucas' ideas for the new STAR WARS trilogy, and elected to go in their own direction, and Iger revealed in his book that Lucas felt betrayed when he found out during a meeting with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, and THE FORCE AWAKENS co-writer Michael Arndt.
George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations. George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better… George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.
Following a private screening of STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, Bob Iger wrote that George Lucas did little to hide his disappointment. "'There’s nothing new,' he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, 'There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.' He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars," wrote Iger. However, Iger added that the elements which Lucas took issue with were the result of Disney trying to launch a STAR WARS franchise which would connect with the films audiences loved. "We’d intentionally created a world that was visually and tonally connected to the earlier films, to not stray too far from what people loved and expected," Iger explained, "and George was criticizing us for the very thing we were trying to do." Regardless of Lucas' disappointment, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS went on to become critically praised and grossed over $2 billion worldwide, so clearly Disney was doing something right. That said, Bob Iger also admitted to The New York Times that they "might've put a little too much in the marketplace too fast." With four films in as many years, I can't say that I disagree, but thankfully Disney will be pumping the breaks a little following the release of STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER on December 20, 2019.