George Lucas is leaving Star Wars behind him, and he's ready to move on to bigger and better things. In a recent interview with EW he talks about what those plans are, which include making personal films that we will never see.
Lucas will be a creative consultant on the future Star Wars movies, but he's leaving it in the hands of Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. When asked if he'd help pick out a director to take on the franchise he said,
I’ve turned it over to a wonderful producer, Kathy Kennedy, and I’ve known her for years. She’s more than capable of taking it and making it better than I did.
It couldn't have been easy to let Star Wars and Lucasfilm go, but the guy has a plan and he's ready to move on to the next chapter of his life,
It’s very sad. It’s 40 years of work and it’s been my life, but I’m ready to move on to bigger and better things. Mostly it will be philanthropy but I’m also going to make my own little personal films.
As you may have heard, he's donating a lot of that 4 billion dollars he made off the Lucasfilm sale to help education. He went on to talk about his last movie Red Tails, which told the story of of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen. The film was a labor of love for him, and he's working on other film projects that we'll most likely never see.
I’m going to go further out than that. I barely got Red Tails into the theaters. The ones I’m working on now will never get into the theaters.
We've heard him say this before, but I really do hope that one day the films Lucas makes will see the light of day. What really matters is that he'll be making movies just because he loves it. As much as some of us have complained about Lucas ruining the Star Wars movies over the years, are you happy for him that he's cashed out and leaving it behind to pursue the stuff he's always wanted to do?