alternatehistory.com

OOC: This is the first Double-Blind What If thread I've posted.
------​
In early 70s, George Lucas, a director known for his films, THX 1138 and American Graffiti wrote a synopsis called Star Wars. The story was a simple tale of good and evil placed in a science fiction setting, about a young farmboy against an evil empire.

However, George Lucas had obligations to his friend, Francis Ford Coppola who was filming Apocalypse Now, an epic war film based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The production was encountering severe difficulties on set. Because of that, George Lucas went to the filming location of Apocalypse Now to assist with the production.

At the intervals between the troubled production of Apocalypse Now and its release, adult-oriented science fiction was becoming a popular genre with mass audiences and respectability with major film critics.
This genre was spurned by the late 60s releases of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and 20th Century Fox's Planet of the Apes (1968). It was a major blockbuster with audiences and critics alike, with praise given to its innovate ideas, thematic complexity and scale unprecedented by any science fiction to date.

After the production of Apocalypse Now, George Lucas unsuccessfully pitched Star Wars to major film studios who were producing adult-oriented science fiction films. The main reasons why it was rejected because Star Wars was too similar with 2001 and Jodorowsky's Dune, lack of appeal to the adult-audience and other reasons related to it.

The main question of this thread: What would happen if space fantasy films like Star Wars become popular?
Top