I’ve moved everything to this thread.
Here’s some in depth analysis of a couple of my ideas.
JEDIT: I’ve moved the following text from the first post to clear it up so it can focus more on the broad points.
I want to make Dooku the unifying villain of the Prequels, like Darth Vader is in the Originals. That means he should be in every film of the trilogy. We’d cast someone new as a younger Dooku and have them chroma keyed into an existing scene.
The obvious choice would be to have him as Jedi on Coruscant. He could talk to Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. The only scene that would really work is the balcony scene, where Obi-Wan tells him that if he wasn’t so radical, he’d be on the council. At that point, Dooku could step in and take Qui-Gon’s side.
A post-credits scene of him ordering the Clone Army would be neat (in my edits, he is Syfo-Dyas (yes that contradicts TCW, but it’s just a single episode, so I can overlook it)), but wouldn’t make much sense, as it would spoil the mystery of the next movie, has no relevance to this movie’s plot, and SW doesn’t do post-credits scenes anyway.
An alternative would be having him already left the Jedi and replacing Sidious with him. I’d rather not due this for the simple reason that I don’t want to contradict TCW, which makes it clear that Maul was Sidious’s apprentice, not Tyrannus’s. I guess he could be neither a Sith nor a Jedi at that point, working as a middle man between Sidious and Maul, but it would be odd for a Sith master not to speak to his apprentice directly like that.
The main problem with TPM IMO (aside from feeling redundant) is that the main character is Qui-Gon instead of Obi-Wan. It’s especially true on Tatooine. How can we remedy this? It’s not within our abilities to just add him to the Tatooine part, so we should try to give him something else to do. Unfortunately, all we have to work with is shots of him on the ship.
I was thinking maybe we could have him encounter one of Maul’s probes while hanging out on the ship. Instead of Maul finding Qui-Gon, he finds the ship. It gives them a reason to run without having to re-add that scene of Qui-Gon killing the drone. The problem would be making a scene of Obi-Wan taking out the drone. I doubt it’d be feasible. At most, we could have him spot the drone on the ship’s sensors and alert the crew. I suppose they could shoot the drone with ship, but at that point, we might as well just let the drone get away, as it wouldn’t be Obi-Wan personally dealing with it.