Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 8 Major Revelations From The Filmmakers
3. Scrapped Story Ideas
You may remember rumours of Star Wars: The Force Awakens kicking off with the discovery of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, and while that has yet to be confirmed by anyone involved with the movie, it turns out that they threw plenty of other ideas around during the writing process. Michael Arndt has said that among the various other MacGuffin suggested were Darth Vader's remains and a quest to the underwater wreckage of the second Death Star to find a key piece of history about sacred Jedi sites scattered throughout the Galaxy (though they all quickly agreed that that didn't make a whole lot of sense what with it blowing up over Endor). It was ultimately decided that Luke himself should be the MacGuffin, and going back to Han Solo for a moment, it turns out that his character arc in The Force Awakens could have also played out very differently. "I had thought Hans story and Leias story was just about them coming back together," the writer explained. "At the end of the movie they would have reconciled and gotten over their differences. And you would have said, Okay, bad stuff happened, but at least theyre back together again. J.J. rightly asked, What is Han doing in this movie? If were not going to have something important and irreversible happen to him, then he kind of feels like luggage. He feels like this great, sexy piece of luggage you have in your movie. But hes not really evolving. Hes not really pushing the story forward." So, things clearly could have gone a very different route for poor old Han! Regardless, it's easy to spot how some of these early ideas would have been incorporated into the movie, and it will be interesting to see if any of them are revisited in the upcoming films. Kylo Ren having Vader's charred helmet and what appeared to be his ashes seem to indicate that at least one of those was addressed between Episodes VI and VII.
