And I'm still not convinced it would have been any better. Or even any good at all. Well we'll never know. Either way, any flaws the final film suffers from are entierly their responsibility since they're the one's that created the far from ideal situation the rest of the crew and company were stuck with thanks to their shenannigans.
From most reports the problem wasn't that Disney weren't getting what they wanted, it was Lucasfilm. It's one thing to skate past studio notes in the name of artistic vision, it's quite another to ignore the production company. That's a whole other ball game. Also, being inventive is one thing. Refusing to stick to the script is entirely another.
Imagine for a second if you hired an interior decorator. You agree on a brief and a finalised spec, then when you come to check on them you notice they've done something you didn't agree to. You ask them to fix it back to the way you'd agreed upon. Not only do they not fix it, they continue to make changes WAY off from what you asked for. Next thing you know there's a dump truck with three tons of glitter, an industrial sized barrel of adhesive, and a dozen one sizth scale plaster sculptures of Dr. Seuss characters that you hadn't budgeted for is backup up into your driveway. I think it's not unfair to say that this is when you fire those lunatics, and get someone you actually trust to do the job.
There's no way a 200+ million dollar production like this gets the green light unless there's a *lot* of conversations about exactly what it is they intend to make. That's what pre-production is all about. So if a Director(s) goes so far off the script they had to be fired then that means they effectively sat through that entire process and flat out lied about what they intended to do, just so they could get into hired into the position they wanted, hoping that they'd somehow get away with spending a lot of someone else's money on they pet fantasy project instead of what they actually agreed to. Or they flat out changed their minds after the fact. At which point the professional thing to do is to have a conversation with the producers and decide how to proceed, even if it means resigning and moving onto another project.
Regardless of intent, what they ended up doing is try to blaze ahead no matter what and instead ran right into a brick wall of consequences. Essentially they played chicken with a veteran movie producer, and lost.
If they *really* wanted to make a semi-improv comedy space cowboy movie then the thing to do is go write the script, and either convince a studio to buy it, or raise the money themselves. NOT go and try to hijack someone else's script and go rogue in an established franchise movie. It's both dumb and deeply unprofessional. There's a reason why neither of them have been allowed anywhere near a director's chair since.
