Disney Scrapped George Lucas's Version Of 'Star Wars: Episode VII'

When George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 for $4 billion, the sale included treatments for Lucas's "Star Wars" ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX.

So, even though the Mouse House was now in charge of all things "Star Wars," it appeared as if fans were still going to get Lucas's version of the next trilogy.

It turns out that's not the case.

Cinemablend spoke with Lucas at the press conference for his new animated feature "Strange Magic," where he told them Disney essentially scrapped his ideas for VII, VIII, and IX.

"The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those," Lucas told Cinemablend. "So they made up their own. So it's not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens]."

According to Bloomberg, Iger thought the treatments "had a lot of potential."

Lucas has been tossing around ideas for a third "Star Wars" trilogy since the launch of the original trilogy. A TIME magazine article from March 1978 suggested Lucas had plans for up to a dozen "Star Wars" movies.

He even pitched the idea of "Episode VII" to actor Mark Hamill in the '80s.

Lucas is now serving as a "creative consultant" on "Star Wars."

What does that mean? Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy described it like this:

"The beauty of the collaboration that can continue is as we work our way through these scripts if we're sitting and saying, 'Hmm, I wonder if this character can do that?' or 'Does this make sense within the rules of 'Star Wars'?' … He's the keeper of the flame when it comes to that."