Via Polygon.com:

Despite the decades that have passed since its release, it would be hard to argue that any film is as relevant to the way movies are made today than George Lucas’ 1977 space opera, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.

Kevin Feige, the Marvel head honcho who presides over what is the most lucrative and successful film franchise currently operating — including Star Wars — talks openly about how much of an impact the original trilogy had on him. The list of filmmakers who directly crib from Lucas would be like a census of Hollywood royalty. And the subsidiary industries that Star Wars has spawned, from toys to novels to video games, has changed how the entertainment business works.

But when you eliminate the biases that come from living in a Star Wars-addled world and look back at the circumstances of its creation, what’s far more surprising is that the film got made at all. That a USC grad in his early 30s best known for a coming-of-age story about small-town America would conjure an original sci-fi cinematic universe out of whole cloth, when the precedent for such a thing simply did not exist. Investors paid for his bizarre, childlike vision. People went to see it.

The release of Solo: A Star Wars Story just five months after that of The Last Jedi makes it clear that Star Wars has never been more ubiquitous than it is now; in fact, if Solo’s box office is any indication, audiences might actually be going a little sour on Disney’s attempts to turn the property from a touchstone of childhood and nostalgia into a never-ending modern-day cinematic universe like Marvel and its imitators. Considering that tension, it makes sense to wonder: What would the last four decades look like if George Lucas had never made Star Wars at all?

Here’s one possibility.

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