George Lucas' plan for the Star Wars sequels was ... WTF?

Star Wars creator George Lucas has a long history of making statements about plans for future Star Wars films that do not pan out. At various times since 1977 he has said that his space fantasy series was supposed to be 6, 9, 12 or 15 movies. He has mused about films entirely devoted to Wookiees or droids.

He is, to put it politely, something of an improvisational artist.

That said, Lucas' apparent original plan for the sequel trilogy (the movies that became The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and the upcoming Episode IX) is an eye-opening WTF idea, even for him.

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According to the companion book to the AMC documentary series James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction, which features Cameron interviewing Lucas (full disclosure: the show also contains me), the Star Wars creator was "going to get into a microbiotic world" and finally introduce us to mysterious creatures called the Whills -- who "feed off the Force" and are actually "controlling the universe."

If the name of Whills sounds familiar, that's probably because the original Star Wars was originally described as being "from the Journal of the Whills," some kind of never-seen chronicle that was also excerpted in the Star Wars novelization.

(Cue Luke Skywalker's awe-struck whisper: "the sacred Jedi texts!")

In Rogue One, the characters Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) described themselves as Guardians of the Whills, but no further explanation was offered. They were also briefly mentioned in the Clone Wars series. But we've never met them.

Lucas' mention of "a microbiotic world" -- and his comparison to the reaction to The Phantom Menace -- has led some Star Wars fans to assume the creator was going to return to those much-loathed "midi-chlorians" -- a concept he actually came up with all the way back in 1977, but didn't use for 20 years.

Midi-chlorians were the microorganisms that supposedly act as a marker for how much Force power an individual has. (After Anakin Skywalker's "high midi-chlorian count" in that movie was much mocked, they were never mentioned again.)

But that's a big assumption to make just because Lucas used the word "microbiotic," which simply refers to microorganisms in general.

For all we know, maybe Lucas was planning on reducing a character or two to microbial size: Honey, I Shrunk the Jedi!

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It's also worth noting that this isn't the first report on what Lucas had planned for the sequel trilogy.

According to another recent book, The Art of The Last Jedi, Lucas' plan for the first of the sequel movies was to have Luke Skywalker as a hermit on a remote planet approached by a young female would-be Jedi -- in other words, exactly what we got in The Last Jedi, just one movie earlier.

How the Whills and the world of microbiota would have wrapped into a Rey-Luke meeting is a mystery known only to the reclusive creator himself. And perhaps not even to him.

Because despite Lucas' claim that he could have gone it alone, he was in fact pretty eager to sell his company in 2012 for $4.06 billion. Which, given the subsequent success of the franchise, now looks like something of a bargain for Disney.