In the latest entry of our ongoing series, Screen Rant's Ryan George reveals what (probably) happened in the pitch meeting for Star Wars Episode IV: The Empire Strikes Back. Directed by Irvin Kershner and released in 1980, Empire Strikes Back was the first follow-up to the monumentally successful Star Wars, which had won six Academy Awards and broke the domestic and worldwide box office records. Needless to say, there was a little bit of pressure for the sequel to perform.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back picks up three years after the previous movie, with the Rebel forces hiding out on the icy planet of Hoth. Things start to go badly for Luke right away when he gets punched by a wampa, dragged to a cave, and hung upside down by his feet. He manages to free himself and staggers out into the snow, which is when the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi decides it's a good time to show up and tell Luke to go to the swamp planet Dagobah. After a night spent inside some tauntaun guts and an attack by the Empire, Luke ends up on Dagobah while Han and Leia seek refuge with Han's extremely trustworthy friend, Lando Calrissian.
It's never easy being the middle movie of a trilogy, and when The Empire Strikes Back was first released some were taken aback by the fact that it just sort of ends, with Luke sliding away from a fight after finding out that Darth Vader is his father, and poor Han Solo still frozen in carbonite. Now, however, The Empire Strikes Back is generally regarded as the best movie of the original trilogy, and arguably still the best Star Wars movie of all time.
Forty years later, the Star Wars franchise is gearing up for the release of the ninth movie in the main series, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. After the sequel trilogy's own middle child, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, divided fans, The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams is returning to bring the story home. Original trilogy bad guy Emperor Palpatine is making a comeback, and we'll even get to see the remains of the second Death Star that crashed on Endor after its destruction in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
After The Rise of Skywalker, the Star Wars franchise will go on a brief hiatus until 2022, but with new movie series in the works from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, that galaxy far, far away is only going to keep getting bigger.