Nobody is going to buy tickets to "Star Peace".

I would pay to see a movie during the peaceful years of the Jedi showing the struggles of a child being taken into the Jedi order trained up through to Jedi Knight. Emotional trauma of losing family, the rigorous training, confusing philosophy classes about magic, tension of building the first lightsaber that could explode in their face, first mission under a master as a padawan, and so on.

There are stories to tell that don't involve how Anakin screwed over the galaxy for multiple generations.

Neither of these take place during peaceful times, but both of the TV shows (Clone Wars & Rebels) have taken the time to cover the rest of what you mentioned. They may be somewhat aimed at a younger audience but by no means are kiddie-only shows. Dave Filoni is one of the best things to ever happen to Star Wars story telling, and being in charge of their animation department I expect to see much more good work coming from them after Rebels ends this year.

Instead of just getting a 2 hour movie every year or two, they can spend a lot more screen hours building characters and themes and showing the downtime between the battles and big events. There is going to be more Star Wars TV in the future and I wouldn't blow it off just because it doesn't seem aimed at you.

I'm well aware of the TV shows for Star Wars and I particularly like Rebels. I'm in my forties and enjoy them immensely.

>> I wouldn't blow it off just because it doesn't seem aimed at you

Who said anything remotely like that?

I can't speak for everyone, but I would definitely have bought tickets to Star Peace. Especially over "Star Wars: even more cgi edition".

I in fact left the theater thinking "How about a Star Wars movie without any battles or explosions? Couldn't that be more interesting?" I wonder what's been done in fanfiction.

I can see it now. Two hours of Luke, Leia and Han just hanging out talking about how awesome things are without the empire, maybe make fun of C3PO a bit have a few drinks then just cruise around checking out how chill all the planets are now.

I'm sure they could still manage to get into some side adventures.

Don't misunderstand. That would be a way better movie than the last two even without side adventures. They're two of the very few movies in my life I've fallen asleep in the middle of. I don't do that often.

They have something like 40+ books in the Expanded Universe to steal from. The dictum in Hollywood is to give something "similar but different".

A quick search shows 381, counting short stories and young adult books. This doesn't count the roughly 80+ books that are or will be canon under Disney, currently out or at least announced.

I hand-counted on wikipedia back when Disney said that Expanded Universe wouldn't be canon so will trust your Google or other search. My count would not include anything Disney-related nor movie novelizations.

Point being, they're spending a lot of money and want to play it safe. You can do much more in a novel than a blockbuster movie. They do have decades of past original content to draw off of but there's most likely a larger general movie fanbase than those that did the deep dive into the books so might as well appeal to them.

"Similar but different".

“The military movie industrial complex is strong in he young one”