https://www.ign.com/articles/willow-sequel-series-ron-howard-active-development
Great movie. Extremely underrated.
Are they going to adapt the trilogy of sequel books? I've heard at least moderately good things about them, and I'm too lazy^H^H^H^Hbusy to click on a link and read even a single line despite my respectable reading speed. :P
Damn, there's a blast from the past. Only saw that movie once, when I was around 14.
Wife and I watched that movie last night for the first time in decades. We both had fond memories of it.
Memories were partly wrong. Outside of Val Kilmer doing his best Han Solo impression and his future ex-wife being hot, I don't know why I liked it so much.
Lucas was even cribbing his own stuff this time. The plot was Lord of the Rings with a baby and the villain might as well have been a gender flipped Palpatine without the nuance.
I mean, it wasn't awful. Ron Howard's direction was clearly as a freshman but it had some good action and was occasionally fun. It's just not so much a classic for me.
Guess I'll check out the series though. I do like Warwick Davis.
I read somewhere that Willow was born out of the horrible 2nd Ewoks movie, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (they were both horrible, but especially the 2nd). It's got a lot to answer for if that's the case.
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on August 09, 2020, 08:37:03 PM
I read somewhere that Willow was born out of the horrible 2nd Ewoks movie, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (they were both horrible, but especially the 2nd). It's got a lot to answer for if that's the case.
Lucas was working on a "Munchkin" movie for a long time, as far back as 1972. He knew he could never secure the rights to Hobbitt/LOTR like he couldn't Flash Gordon for Star Wars. So he was putting together a project that essentially filed the serial numbers off and repurposed the story.
Again, same approach he used for Star Wars, he just didn't put anywhere nearly the attention towards it. As he kept developing the story into Willow he started cribbing off himself and adding in Han Solo, a bare bones Palpatine, a unconventional rogue/princess love story, a Yoda/Obi-Wan substitute.
He passed it to Ron Howard because they met and became friends on American Graffiti and Lucas had at that point decided he wasn't going to do the film himself. Howard took the golden opportunity to do his first directorial film under the Lucasfilm label.
I think the result is ok. Knowing how deeply Lucas loved to crib from and have an homage to other properties, I am not surprised Willow is derivative. It's just more lazily deriitive than pretty much everything else Lucas personally did.