Star Wars: The High Republic

[Saintheart]

I think the only way a Star Wars Old Republic movie series could work is if Disney makes as clean a break as possible with the existing movie franchise.

Don't have Yoda in his middle age. Having a group of characters you know will survive into the next movies was one of the toughest storytelling issues the PT had, and while Revenge of the Sith was a pretty decent attempt at filling in what happened, the rest was suboptimal at best. If you must have Yoda, have him as a newly-arrived padawan that we see right at the movie series' end. Just give that tantalising hint of a connection to the OT via that route and otherwise stay as clear as you can of OT characters.

The Sith on film canon have been 'extinct for a millennia' on the Jedi Council's understanding when The Phantom Movie opens, which means unless you have some sort of rubbish "Nobody has told Ki-Adi-Mundi the whole story" plotline, that means there's been no open confrontation between the Jedi and the Sith for quite literally a thousand years. Yes, you could try and make the story about some sort of covert conflict involving some of the Darth Bane Sith who are still in hiding, but that story has no suspense to it because we know the Sith will survive, just as we know Anakin Skywalker is going to become Darth Vader by the end of ROTS.

Unless Disney wants to retool Star Wars to cater to an audience of adults who can digest a complex plot - and it won't, Star Wars is first and foremost for toy sales - then in my view the most fertile ground for storytelling opportunities is to look at the Republic before its period of long stability, and ideally right before the thousand years of Sith 'extinction' for the maximum payoff.

Make it that the galaxy prior to that point is one where monarchy and feudalism reigns supreme; there is a Republic, but it's made up only of the rich and powerful systems, not the smaller worlds. It's like this because of the Sith threat, which rages across half the galaxy and which the Jedi fight against as a renegade, commando force, if at all, and then mostly because they don't believe in the Republic's ability to police itself. The overall throughline of the story is about how the Republic systems eventually realise they can fight the Sith when they stand as one, with the Jedi coming out of the shadows as a sanctioned force and capitalising on Sith infighting to destroy them, essentially as George Lucas originally envisioned the Sith moving to the Rule of Two.

Your series ends in a reversed form of the ending of ROTS: peace is established as the Republic settles down to universal if not majority franchise; Yoda first arrives at the newly-built Jedi Temple on Coruscant as a padawan, counterpointed to Darth Bane and his apprentice going into hiding under a blood-red sunset on some godforsaken world.

You certainly have to have non-Jedi and non-politician protagonists, though. That's a big part of what made the OT relatable: characters like Han Solo and Chewbacca, who didn't have godlike powers and who provided different viewpoints to the pathos of the Jedi-Sith spiritual conflict. The loss of those characters is one part of the rot that developed.