[citation][nom]padwars[/nom]A few decades after end of episode 6, empire is long dead, the Force has triumphed and darkside has turned upon itself. What is going to really happen anyway? A few old timer heroes sitting around a table recounting the good old days? Looks like a lot of discontinuity to me.[/citation]
The whole 9 part series was writen all at once a 'long time ago' and everything follows the standard plot theme of a 'standard' american movie:
Trilogy 1: You see the 'normal world', you are introduced to the storytellers (droids), the knowledge keepers or elders (Jedi), The protagonist (in this case the skywalker bloodline), the antagonists (Sith), and all of the major power factions. The normal world is introduced to conflict, and everything falls apart.
Trilogy 2: Picking up where the first trilogy leaves off you follow the 2nd gen of protagonists and antagonists, and watch the good guy underdogs win the day.
Trilogy 3: It is all about cleanup. There will be political throws and power plays within the new republic. The Jedi order (which remember is supposed to be neutral, not good or bad) needs to be rebuilt as literally every Jedi was slaughtered some 20-40 years previous this story. And there will also be new power struggles between the new republic and various groups that have risen to power in the power vacume left by the Empire falling. This will include some Imperial generals with loyal fleets, drug cartels, as well as the Hutt smugglers.
Plenty of story to be told there, the problem is that it is a story that has a lot of heads moving in different directions with no overtly central theme for all of the allies to get around. I think that is why Disney is thinking about doing the main 3 movies which round out the last 1/3 of plot, and then supplementing with a bunch of individual stories that follow specific characters with smaller stories in this more fractured universe. Really, this whole time period would lend itself really well to some sort of MMO to play in rather than a movie series.
These types of 'rebuilding' stories are often cut out of movies simply because they do not make good movies. The best/worse example of this was Lord of the Rings. What made that whole story absolutely amazing is looking at it as a way for the people of that generation to deal with coming home from war. You go out, live through hell, and then come home expecting to be able to just live life. But instead you are greeted to the pillaging of the shire where all of the minor pests have grown to become crooked power brokers because nobody was left to keep them in check, and so already exhausted heroes need to begrudgingly deal with a whole other battle before they can just rest. It made the book great, but it makes for terrible movie story-telling, so it was (sadly but appropriately) cut. I will be rather interested to see how Disney deals with this final ending as it always struck me as a better book ending than one for making a good movie.