We talked to producer Rick McCallum ahead of this week's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith DVD release, and he had gave us a few tidbits on George Lucas' plans for his **Star Wars **TV series.
"What we said is why don’t we try and restructure the process of how television is made; let’s set up our own studio, with the same players. They’re not going to be out of work; they’ll make a decent living; there’s no stars, the actors get what the crew gets, the crew gets what the actors get. We try and set up a different system to make a television series that had all the basic look and feel of a feature film.
"What we want to do is take everything we’ve learned from feature films and this new digital pipeline and put it back into television and set a standard for how in four or five years time we can start making feature films for five or ten million dollars instead of the $80, $90, $100 million it takes now."
He also joined Lucas in emphasising that those fans hoping for Episodes VII, VIII and IX are in for a long wait. "The 9 films thing, he really was misquoted. He wrote all 6 episodes, but didn’t write them in episodic form. He picked the point that he thought would be easiest to finance and make. That was Episode 4. He never even dreamed he’d be able to do a sequel, let alone a prequel. It had never been done before; it was just a dream for him."
For more from McCallum on Lucas' plans, the Star Wars phenomenon and his opinions on the future of Hollywood, check out our interview here.