Imagine, imagine if Disney had said: Star Wars isn’t a franchise, it’s a genre.
The legendary galaxy, a long time ago, far far away, is well understood: What’s true is what’s in the Holocron continuity database.
Open the Holocron. Show everyone what’s in it. Let it become history.
Then let anyone make movies and books that share the Star Wars world. Not like all those other franchises that argue about what’s canon and what’s not… rise above it, become a new shared set of conventions, formulas, history and myth, just like the western but for the 21st century.
So that’s what I wished would happen, but we’re getting Episode VII instead and a bunch more movies coming soon, set in a fictional universe the cultural ownership of which will be policed and its geology mined for the untold riches of merchandise, which is how our world works in 2014 so I can’t feel disappointed, and I guess that’s okay too.