Executives told George Lucas The Phantom Menace would “destroy the franchise”

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace remains controversial to this day, but there was a time studio executives told George Lucas it would “destroy” the franchise.

Star Wars is very popular. You probably don’t need me to tell you that. From the original movies to the prequels to the sequel trilogy to The Mandalorian, a lot of people enjoy movies and TV shows set in this universe, to the point where it’s basically a media empire unto itself.

And although he got out when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney, it all started with George Lucas. This year is the 20th anniversary of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the first movie in Lucas’ prequel franchise. Perhaps that’s why a lot of people are paying attention to a new quote from Lucas that appears in the book The Star Wars Archives 1999-2005, out now from Taschen. The film famously stirred up controversy among fans when it came out in 1999, but it ends up the executives at Fox were worried at the outset, as well.

Although they weren’t at first. In the beginning, they “were as excited as anybody else” about a trilogy of movies exploring the origins of Darth Vader…but when they learned the first movie would revolve around the 10-year-old Anakin Skywalker, they freaked out. “You’re going to destroy the franchise,” Lucas remembers them saying, “you’re going to destroy everything!”

Obviously that didn’t happen: The Phantom Menace made over $1 billion at the box office and the Star Wars franchise went on to become a behemoth that crushes almost everything in its path, and it was already colossal. Knowing that, it’s a little funny to hear that Lucas say that, so far as The Phantom Menace was concerned, he was “making a movie that nobody wants to see”…yeah they did. Of course they did, whatever the fan blowback.

But speaking of the blowback, one of the big complaints at the time was that the movie seemed too geared towards kids, a criticism Lucas spent a lot of time dealing with back in the day. “I kept it as it was originally intended,” he told Empire not long after the movie came out. “The fans’ expectations had gotten way high and they wanted a film that was going to change their lives and be the Second Coming. You know, I can’t do that, it’s just a movie. And I can’t say, now I gotta market it to a whole different audience. I tell the story.”

"I knew if I’d made Anakin 15 instead of nine, then it would have been more marketable. If I’d made the Queen 18 instead of 14, then it would have been more marketable. But that isn’t the story. It is important that he be young, that he be at an age where leaving his mother is more of a drama than it would have been at 15. So you just have to do what’s right for the movie, not what’s right for the market."

I dunno, weren’t there lots of movies with younger leads that were big successes? Adjusted for inflation, E.T. is still the fourth highest grossing movie of all time…

But never mind. The point is that everything worked out, especially if you had a financial stake in it.

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h/t Digital Spy