>>11449333What I've been thinking about for the last few years is that eventually they are going to have to have new actors as Luke, Han and Leia, without deepfakes. Star Wars can't go on indefinitely avoiding the characters that made the franchise what it is when the sequels failed so horribly at passing the torch. Some people insist that the original characters are what's holding Star Wars back, to which I say "How?" They've barely had any screentime in any live action media since Disney bought the IP. There's no evidence that Star Wars movies and shows have been flopping because they had too much Luke Skywalker.
What's more, I think we're robbing a new generation of actors and audiences of having their own stars by hiding the actors' faces behind CGI deepfakery. Graham Hamilton was an absolute deadringer for Luke just from the hair and makeup they did him up in even you can tell it's not Mark Hamill, and seeing him without the CG mask honestly makes me feel weirdly nostalgic for something that didn't happen, a lost timeline where instead of cavalcade horrible soulless corporate slop movies and TV shows we instead got a fresh set of actors to just pick up where Return of the Jedi left off and tell us the stories that happened after Return of the Jedi. They had a hundred novels, comics and games to draw stories from plus the hindsight advantage of only bringing the best and most fondly remembered ones to the screen.
If, not when when Star Wars gets the reset button hit on it, I think that's what needs to happen. It's so obvious and staring everyone in the face that we need to go back and have more adventures with the characters who made the IP what it is, and it needs to be the stories that the fans already know will work. Any studio would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get the rights to just the Thrawn Trilogy, and yet Disney who sits on the entire EU library has said "we gave ourselves a strict a rule that we can't adapt those because reasons."
