I am not concerned about the TV show either, at least with regards to contradicting anything that’s done to the movies. If you start down that path of making sure every product conforms to a strict continuity, forever will it dominate your destiny.
As of now, there are some points I think would be useful for the project’s guidelines:
Continuity. Does this change help tie the movies together? Not all changes have to, but it’s a plus.
Practicality. How realistic or doable is the change?
Motivation. How does the change benefit the narrative? (a flimsy rule atm)But I think we should still have enough levity for some edits just because they’re “cool”.
Some other things I think could be important are (4)seamlessness and (5)runtime. Seamlessness: can the change be made and still feel professional? Now, there could be radical changes to the movies, but I don’t think the movies should be completely redone, if that makes sense. I think the basics of each movie should be kept, mainly because I like the idea of somebody watching these edits and maybe not initially realizing it is a fan edit, just a lot better than they remembered. I do think maintaining a decent runtime is crucial, and it shouldn’t go under a certain length, because it being too short would make it feel not like a realistic version of the movie, to me at least.
Good guidelines. So as a general rule, continuity would be the most important of these, correct?
If so, perhaps one way to organize this edit would be to come up with a set of changes that forms a subplot linking all of the prequels and beyond. There are many loose threads to follow here, such as:
1: What is the plot of TPM? What does the Trade Federation want? What is Palpatine cooking up? He is surely working on the clone army, what foreshadowing can we concoct?
2: What happened to Sifo-Dyas? How does Tyrannus fit into Palpatine’s plan? Is the Death Star a plan of the Geonosians, or something else?
3: Where did Grevious come from, and what makes him more than a random stock villan? If Plagueis was around in TPM, does that change the film?
You can see how most of these questions arise from confusion about Palpatine’s master plan. Perhaps the organizing principle of these edits is to illuminate this plan.