very odd take: what if JJ Abrams had done a straight-forward Star Trek sequel to DS9 / Voyager and done his wacky “time-travel reboots the series vaguely” shtick with, er, Star Wars - which I imagine would be old Harrison Ford sent back by a Force Storm to watch as, hmm, Captain Phasma[0] destroys Endor with Star-Killer Base[1] and Robert Boulter, Alden Ehrenreich, and Billie Lourd sort of scramble around?
I vaguely think this could make both series better? Captain Rey at least moves Trek past weird-prequel territory, while hmm, reboot Star Wars def. has Startrooper Solo defecting and Prince Luke Organa and Leia Skywalker growing up on Tattooine and learning to use a lightsaber and FUCK NOW I WANT THIS[2]
[0] phasma is actually a decent equivalent to nero (underrated) as a low-level grunt who is empowered by time-travel, and also she deserves more screen-time anyway
[1] probably better thematic sense if luke gets sent back and tatooine goes bye-bye, but I do get the sense that Ford was The One Actor Abrams Wanted To Work With in the same way Nimoy was
[2] this begs the obvious question of Rian Johnson's ESB[3] now that he is literally remaking ESB; Leia confronting her father with foreknowledge is already a different story and actually fits sort of well with TLJ - I guess she convinces him to kill Palpatine but Vader doesn't repent? also donald glover so #lit
[3] literally what the fuck are the episode numbers now
Using this an an excuse to bump this thread, that's an interesting idea that as you say might make both series better. Though arguably it would be better for
Star Trek than for
Star Wars. I think the biggest hurdle might be Abrams himself - he wanted to make
Star Wars, even when he was making
Star Trek, and he plastered that onto an idea that had been floated about in
Star Trek since (if I remember correctly) the 1990s. Nemesis might have already killed the possibility of doing a sequel to
The Next Generation-era programmes, and it would be unlikely that Paramount would want to take the risk on doing the next again generation for their big-budget movie extravaganza. Even if the idea flies, the end result will likely be very similar to the 2009
Star Trek film, just without the characters from TOS. The question I would ask is who would be the Nimoy/Ford equivalent in this film. Nimoy himself strikes me as being potentially the most likely, and if not him then probably Patrick Stewart.
Doing a vague
Star Wars reboot would be a very ballsy move by whoever made it, and much like the Starfleet Academy idea for
Star Trek the idea of a sequel to
Return of the Jedi had been one of those ideas that was already there as an idea. I'm just picturing this as being
Solo: A Star Wars Story writ large. I can also see a
Star Trek (2009) style
Star Wars film really getting a fan backlash, but more importantly and significantly not doing as well as
The Force Awakens - Sending the franchise back to the drawing board.
In the unlikely event we get Abrams
Star Trek/Star Wars switcheroo, we might end up with the oddity of a successful
Star Trek film series consisting of a main series and various spin-offs releasing annually or biannually and
Star Wars after a few reboot films going to a streaming series set in the 'Prime Universe'.