George Lucas: Hollywood misreads focus groups and lets fans make the movies

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Legendary Star Wars creator George Lucas has expressed his dissatisfaction with focus groups, insisting the audience “doesn’t know what they want to see.”

Lucas, who stepped away from Star Wars after selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion in 2012, told A Rabbit’s Foot that Hollywood studios now take the wrong message from focus groups, and let the audience “actually make the movie.”

“I don’t like focus groups,” Lucas declared. “The audience doesn’t know what they want to see. If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why. But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie. Of course, now they go crazy with that. Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie. You make a movie by finding someone that knows how to make movies, that has a story to tell and is passionate about it.”

Of course, the 82-year-old Lucas has experience when it comes to audience dissatisfaction with a particular character. Star Wars prequel character Jar Jar Binks suffered a backlash from core fans — something he has repeatedly dismissed in interviews by insisting Star Wars is and always has been a kid’s movie.

“The critics and the fans who were 10-years-old when they saw the first one and 13 when they saw the second one complained that they didn’t want to see a children’s film,” Lucas told A Rabbit’s Foot, echoing comments he's made about his prequel decisions in the past. “'Oh, that’s terrible. Jar Jar Binks is terrible!' Everyone said the same thing about R2-D2 and C-3PO. At the beginning there was a huge push for me to get rid of C-3PO, and then in the third one [Return of the Jedi (1983)] people said the same thing about Ewoks. ‘What are you thinking? Get rid of these teddy bears, we want to see an adult movie!’”

This isn't the first time Lucas has criticized Hollywood. In 2024, he said studios lacked imagination , and accused them of “no original thinking.” He’s also had a few things to say about his beloved franchise in the Disney era, suggesting Star Wars’ new bosses got a lot wrong with the Sequel Trilogy . “I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was,” he said, “... who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The Force, for example, nobody understood the Force. When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”

Then, last year, Lucas said he’d let go of his instinct to manage Star Wars . “Disney took it over and they gave it their vision. That’s what happens,” he said. “Of course I’ve moved past it. I mean, I’ve got a life. I’m building a museum. A museum is harder than making movies.”

That’s a reference to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles , which includes a showcase collection he’s been working on for 60 years. As for Star Wars itself, the only confirmed movie with a release date is Star Wars: Starfighter , starring Ryan Gosling and due out May 28, 2027.

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.