Screen Rant's Ryan George reveals what (probably) happened in the pitch meeting for Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. The last Star Wars movie to be directed by George Lucas (barring any surprise comebacks in the future), Revenge of the Sith was released in 2005 and wraps up the much-maligned prequel trilogy, setting everything in place for the start of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope 19 years later.
Although The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones had failed to set the fandom on fire, no self-respecting Star Wars fan was about to miss out on the closing chapter of the trilogy, which would see Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker finally complete his transformation into Darth Vader. Revenge of the Sith grossed $848 million worldwide and is generally regarded as the best of the three prequel movies.
At the heart of the story is the relationship between Anakin and the secretly (but, let's face, not-so-secretly) evil Chancellor Palpatine, who is rescued at the start of the movie and convinces Anakin to chop off Count Dooku's head. From there the slow seduction to the Dark Side builds, with Palpatine using Anakin's fear that something bad will happen to Padme and his unborn twins to tempt him towards using the Force for evil purposes. Things reach the point of no return when Anakin is forced to choose between either Mace Windu or Palpatine in the middle of a battle, and ends the fight by chopping off Mace Windu's arm (resulting in him being thrown out of a window).
Though it has been the subject of a lot of mockery over the years, Revenge of the Sith doesn't suffer from The Phantom Menace's problem of overt goofiness, or from Attack of the Clones' plodding pace. It does, unfortunately, suffer from the same kind of clunky dialogue that spawned so many memes in those movies, and Anakin's big battle with his former master Obi-Wan Kenobi is marred by lines like "Chancellor Palpatine is evil!" and, "From my point of view the Jedi are evil."
If you do miss good old evil Chancellor Palpatine (who went on to become good old evil Emperor Palpatine), you may not have to wait too long to see him again. The first trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker saw Rey and her friends coming across the wreck of the Death Star, followed by a cut to black and a familiar cackle of laughter. You just can't keep a bad guy down!
