George Lucas, on how he nearly sold the Star Wars franchise instead of going into debt to make The Empire Strikes Back:
“At first I was contemplating selling the whole thing to Fox… I’d just take my percentage and go home and never think about Star Wars again.”
H/T: GeekTyrant. Time travelers: you now know the crisis point. Although you shouldn’t go back, because time travel is deeply immoral on general principles. But if you must wipe out billions of people just in order to play God, then at least set it up so that the person who wrote Empire is still on the job and that Lucas is not. Lucas would even thank you for it. Quietly, silently, so that nobody could ever see or hear him do it.
That could be an interesting point-of-divergence for an alt-history story. I really don’t know what the down-range effects of the change would be (mainly because I haven’t thought about it), but I’m sure there’s a novelty there to exploit.
Neither do I, and I don’t think I know enough about film history to write it. 🙁