Here's How Star Wars Creator George Lucas Would Have Ended Episode 9

George Lucas made six Star Wars movies before handing the reins over to Disney in 2012, but he had plenty of ideas for more. Over the years, he has spoken about a variety of different plots for future Star Wars films and TV shows, which ultimately never happened. But now, Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill has revealed one ending that Lucas had in mind for Star Wars Episode IX. Warning, spoilers ahead!

In an interview with IGN, Hamill explained that Lucas--at one stage--planned to have Luke die, just as he did in the recent Star Wars: The Last Jedi. However, this would have occurred at the end of the trilogy. "I happen to know that George didn't kill Luke until the end of [Episode] 9, after he trained Leia," he said. "Which is another thread that was never played upon [in The Last Jedi]."

While it's not clear at which stage Lucas was considering this ending, it is true that he did discuss his potential plans for more Star Wars movies at various stage of his career. In 1999, Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz described Lucas' loose plan for Episodes 7-9, in which Luke and Leia weren't siblings. And in a 1983 interview, Hamill revealed that Lucas was considering having the actor come back many years later to play an older Luke, who would "hand Excalibur down to the next generation." With amazing prescience, Hamill mentioned that Lucas was considering this for 2011--at that point nearly 30 years away, but in reality just four years from Luke's actual return in The Force Awakens.

More recently, Lucas revealed that he supplied outlines for more Star Wars movies when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney. In 2015, he told Cinemablend, "Well, the ones that I sold to Disney and everything, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those. So they made up their own. It's not the ones I originally wrote."

The real Star Wars Episode IX hits theaters in December 2019. Last month, director JJ Abrams said that the movie's script was finished, and that it starts shooting in July. He also hinted that he wouldn't play it safe. "I feel like we need to approach this with the same excitement that we had when we were kids loving what these movies were," he said. "But at the same time, we have to take them places that they haven't gone, and that's sort of our responsibility."

Most of the key actors from both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are expected to return for Episode IX, including Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac. Ridley has already stated that this will be her final Star Wars movie. "I am really, really excited to do the third thing and round it out because ultimately, what I was signing on to was three films," she said in December. "So in my head, it's three films. I think it will feel like the right time to round it out."