Sorry, Star Wars fans, you're not getting that Old Republic trilogy you wanted

Star Wars fans, Last Jedi director Rian Johnson has heard what you want as the subject of his upcoming trilogy of Star Wars movies. And he's not buying it.

He's sympathetic. He loves the subject in question. But alas, that is definitively not what he's going for.

The subject? The Old Republic, that time period in the galaxy far, far away that is long, long before even the Star Wars prequel movies. It's a time where Jedi and Sith fought on a massive scale, before the Sith were reduced to the bizarre conspiracy of two Sith Lords as seen in the prequels.

Thanks in large part to the popular 2003 role-playing videogame Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars fans in various online polls and Twitter chatter named this period as their favorite when asked what Johnson should focus on for his still-mysterious trilogy.

Guess what: he loves it too. But it's just not compelling enough.

"Oh, they love Knights of the Old Republic," Johnson told my colleague Laura Prudom at a Last Jedi press event on Sunday. "I played that game when it first came out and it was like, god, I loved it. Yeah, that’s a fantastic game. And I understand it, the instinct to automatically go to something that you know and love, that you’ve already seen."

And yet Johnson rejects that instinct. "To me," he says, "what’s really fun is the notion of what new stuff are we gonna see, what new stories can we tell?"

The announcement of Johnson's trilogy should have been a tip-off; it said the director would "introduce new characters from a corner of the galaxy that Star Wars lore has never before explored." And yet fans held out hope that this unexplored corner might be set in the compelling ancient period, where we'd get to see the order of Jedi Knights in their swashbuckling pre-prequel prime.

After all, that Old Republic content was swept aside when Star Wars canon was revised in 2014; so far as the official story is concerned, we've never visited that part of the past. Still, Johnson would prefer to do something entirely new. "For me," he says, "the possibility in a new story told over three movies, go anywhere, do anything, sky’s the limit, in Star Wars? That’s so exciting."

Okay, so what's it about? Johnson demurs: "I’m in the very, very beginning phases of trying to think about it so I don’t know yet," he says. "I’m still figuring out what it’s gonna be." No ballpark release year for the first in the trilogy has been announced, let alone an actual date.

But in the creative struggle to come, if the pre-release hype for The Last Jedi is any indication, the Force is already with Rian Johnson.