20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
11. The Real Reason George Lucas Made Greedo Shoot First
Of all the changes George Lucas made for the 1997 Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy, the most infamously egregious is surely altering the Han-Greedo cantina shootout to have Greedo shoot his gun first, so Han only kills him in self-defense.
The reasons for why this was a poor decision on Lucas' part are well-documented, and though most simply assume that Lucas changed the scene to represent Han as a less-ambiguous, more clean-cut character, the answer is actually a little more interesting than that. In Lucas' own words:
"Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, 'Should he be a cold-blooded killer?'...Because I was thinking mythologically – should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, 'Yeah, he should be John Wayne.' And when you're John Wayne, you don't shoot people [first] – you let them have the first shot. It's a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to."
That's certainly a more satisfying answer than doing it to make sure they can sell more Han Solo lunchboxes to kids, even if Greedo shooting first was still a terrible change no matter what Lucas says.