DONT: Bring Back Luke, Leia, Han, etc.
Love em or hate em, the prequels DID do their job of bringing the Star Wars saga to a circular conclusion. It recast the whole enterprise into the story of one mans downfall and his redemption at the hands of his son. Its a huge, sprawling epic with many dead-ends and misfit pieces, but at the end of the day, its a complete story. And its over. Done. Completely. There is no reason, short of laziness and greed. to try and dig up Han, Luke and all the rest for a story set after the fall of the Empire. Those characters exist wholly to those actors, none of whom are in any shape to go running around space corridors just now. Bringing back those characters is a commercial dead-end. Old fans will be never be satisfied with anything new that comes along, and new fans will be pushed away by the complex mythology and history that exists in place before they even set foot in the theater. Beyond that, the original Star Wars characters are more or less useless as figures for drama. They arent even characters anymore so much as pop culture totems, divorced from original meanings into larger, more emblematic statures. It isnt Luke Skywalker, its LUKE SKYWALKER, with all the baggage that that entails. The past few decades of Family Guy, Robot Chicken and Kevin Smith movies have stripped the original films and characters of their dramatic resonance, turning them into easy referential jokes. Any filmmaker is going to struggle to create genuine drama when the audience is snickering every time Luke and Leia share a glance. Better to start fresh.