She'd killed Jabba the Hutt, unthawed her rogue man in Han Solo from carbonite, proved her worth as a speeder bike pilot, and helped bring down the Imperial Shield base on Endor. Once all that was done, Princess Leia Organa, as well as discovering she was sister to a Jedi, became a key member of the New Republic to restore full freedom to the galaxy. The events of RETURN OF THE JEDI and beyond, these certainly were. But not within the original early planning for REVENGE OF THE JEDI, and certainly not with a future alongside her friends, as Producer Gary Kurtz recalled in the nineties:
"In the original idea for JEDI there wasn't another attack on the Death Star. They spent a lot of time getting Han Solo back, and he was supposed to die in the final attack on the Empire. The end was going to be the coronation of Princess Leia as Queen of her people-what was left of them- and separate her out from the others because she then had royal obligations to her family. So, in effect, the coronation cut her off from Luke and the others and they went their separate ways. It was a slightly poignant end in the original."
Would that original ending have worked? Or would a slightly downer ending have proved box office poison, especially with the planned death back then of Han Solo before they changed their mind and stuck with it? (Until THE FORCE AWAKENS, of course- a whole different time period and a very specifically engineered passing of the generational torch). Certainly food for thought and debate...
