In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens‘ Michael Arndt mentioned the nature of early drafts:
Early on I tried to write versions of the story where [Rey] is at home, her home is destroyed, and then she goes on the road and meets Luke. And then she goes and kicks the bad guy’s ass. It just never worked and I struggled with this. This was back in 2012. It just felt like every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over. Suddenly you didn’t care about your main character anymore because, “Oh f–k, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do.”
Replace “Luke” with “Han”, and you have one of the issues with Episode VII in a nutshell. Or, in more prosaic terms, naming your movie “Creed” and getting Michael B. Jordan to play Apollo Creed’s son… and then sidelining him in favor of turning the second half of the movie into Rocky VII.
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Especially since I’ve always found Han to be a more interesting character than Luke anyway on the basis of him basically bullshitting his way around the galaxy.
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