Making a successful Star Wars film is no mean feat. Just ask Disney. Each of the main instalments in its sci-fi saga had lower takings than its predecessor with this year's The Mandalorian and Grogu spinoff having the lowest gross of them all at just $340 million. One creator is bucking this trend. His seven Star Wars videos have attracted uniform praise across thousands of comments and amassed 2 million views. What's more, he didn't have to film a single scene to do it.
The series of YouTube videos is called ‘Star Wars: Lost Legends’ and it is entirely made with AI. It is perhaps the most conclusive proof that, contrary to popular belief, the caliber of AI videos is down to the creator not the program.
Thanks to the technical wizardry of generative AI, the videos feature photorealistic digital doppelgängers of Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia, complete with pitch-perfect recreations of their voices. Set in the era of the beloved original trilogy, rather than Disney's controversial reboots, it takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
This isn't just for nostalgia reasons but also because the two movies were separated by a three-year gap during which time fans were starved of content. Unlike the present day, there weren't any regular streaming shows to satiate their curiosity of what was going on in the Star Wars universe. When Return of the Jedi finally debuted in 1983 it quenched their thirst but left a lot of unanswered questions. Until now.
