This is something that I’ve been tossing back and forth in my head for a while, since even before the Disney/Lucasfilm merger. Thanks to a comment that Cody made on the Clone Wars episode of the Quantum Tavern podcast I thought I would bring the discussion here. I touched on it briefly in the “JJ Abrams confirmed as VII director” thread. The title pretty much says it all but the possible implications are much bigger than just possible crossovers with Marvel comic book characters in-continuity.
First, let’s look at the precedent Marvel has set with possible future’s in their own comics. In X-Men we have multiple possible futures from storylines like Days of Future Past and Age of Apocalypse. There’s also the mid-90’s “2099” line which established one possible future which was then retconned into another alternate reality within the larger Marvel multiverse. This doesn’t mean that the “past” of the 2099 reality doesn’t line up partially (or more) with the “present” of the 616 universe.
As I write this, I don’t know that there’s been any confirmation for or against the possibility that the next Star Wars films would overwrite and ignore the established history from the Expanded Universe. While I’m sure that personnel within Lucasfilm are well aware that the prequels might not have ever existed if not for the momentum that Expanded Universe maintained through both the comics and the novels in the dark times before there were new movies, I’m not so sure Disney cares as they are after the biggest chunk of mass market money they can get. This would not be the first time however that EU writers would be forced to adapt contradictory information from the films to fit the EU continuity. While the powers that be could choose to skip the timeframe of the EU altogether and avoid all this nonsense, by all reports this appears not to be the case. This opens the door wide open for a comic or novel miniseries that could tell the story of where the timeline deviated so that both continuities could exist side-by-side in the larger Star Wars “multiverse.” Even better, as Frakkintalos mentioned in the JJ Abrams thread, if you want to play in the playground, go for it. Who’s to say that Dark Horse or later Disney-owned Marvel couldn’t then expand the Infinities line to tell us the stories of the prequels before (rumor ahead, consume with a healthy level of skepticism) George Lucas was forced to rewrite them in order to cut out his ex-wife from the creative royalties, without disrupting the current continuity.
Finally, this opens up the possibility that if Star Wars is encompassed within the large Marvel multiverse for “the Force” to be “discovered” by the current inhabitants of the Marvel Universe. I don’t think I need to elaborate on what that might mean but at the very least it could mean Earth-based Force users, at most a newly-established Jedi Order in this galaxy.
I can only imagine the Twitter explosion of that this will unleash upon the world.