George Lucas Dishes on the 'Star Wars' We Never Got (With Leia and Darth Maul!)

George Lucas has spent a large portion of his life thinking up stories that could happen in a galaxy far, far away. We got six movies from him until he sold the property to Disney, and now he's just sitting back and watching where that studio has taken the tales for a new generation. 

Still, there are plenty of storylines still swimming around George's head. 

He recently talked with Polygon about one of the plotlines that never made it into the new movies. In it, he revealed Darth Maul's comeback, a new plotline for Princess Leia, and lots of other really interesting snippets. 

Here are some of the highlights. 

What did Lucas want to do with Darth Maul and Leia?

While we all saw the return of Darth Maul as a hologram in Solo: A Star Wars Story, there was a plan to use him in later stories. Lucas told Polygon that Darth Maul would appear with “mechanical legs” and “become the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.”

Turns out being cut in half by a Jedi isn't that big of a deal if you have the dark side within you. 

Lucas went on to explain Maul's place in this world.

“Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books, as his apprentice,” Lucas said. “She was the new Darth Vader and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy.”

That actually sounds like a very interesting twist on the old stories we've seen inside Star Wars. In fact, we kind of got the complete reverse of that within The Force Awakens and Last Jedi, seeing Rey and Luke train together. 

Lucas expanded on his other trilogy idea, saying it was to star Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia Organa as the lead, together with Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and a new generation of Jedi. Lucas describes the new world with the fallen Empire as “harder than starting a rebellion or fighting a war.” Apparently he went on to reference the Iraq War and the stormtroopers who would have essentially formed ISIS. Topical! 

So Maul is basically the leader of ISIS, but Leia would become the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, and “she ended up being the chosen one.”

While we didn't get more detail than that, this seems like a fun and tidy ending to his saga. Still, I think losing Carrie Fisher so quickly into shooting the J.J. Abrams version definitely altered the course of where the movies we go could go. 

What does your gut say about the Lucas version, versus the movies we got? Do you think Lucas' ideas are better?

Let us know in the comments.