You can ignore this post - I’m just putting the original OP here in case people want it for future reference.

The Clone Wars is a sometimes-excellent show that people really want to love, in spite of its shortcomings, so it’s seen a number of edits. Smudger kicked it off with his five TV-to-movie edits. Expanded Universes and Kanemedhurst continued in that tradition. Outbound Flight produced a Maul edit, and others have recently had their own ideas. I’ve enjoyed these edits a lot.

By and large, I’ve found that these edits essentially aim for a two-ish hour runtime, and combine a couple of major arcs. This is done by the editors as well as it can be - either by finding thematically resonant arcs, or at least ones which don’t compete over the same characters, and interlacing them as neatly as possible, before editing the whole for quality. It’s about the best you can do if you’re looking to produce movie-like features, and a lot of these movies have been really excellent.

But this approach poses its own problems. Firstly, as Smudger himself reported early on (I think for his second or third movie), you can end up with a feeling that you’ve basically just taken two unrelated narratives and interlaced them. And secondly, that even the good arcs can drag. They were forced toward a 22-minute runtime, which often means filler action, and it also means that the story tends to break in 22-minute chunks. Uneven pacing like this is compounded by a further delay if you’re intercutting to another story. The capable editors we have here have worked around these issues well, but ultimately these challenges are going to appear and need solving for any TV-to-movie attempt.

(Maul’s content is probably an exception here. There’s enough volume for a good two-plus hour cut, and a good balance of character development and action. But one of the issues I’ve found with others’ approaches to the Maul arcs is that if you do condense your Maul content into one or two movies, then you kind of take away the malice and the focus of Maul’s presence throughout the show. So now you have the opposite problem - you make a good movie, but the series itself feels like a loose connection of anthology ideas, rather than something with a resonant core and real momentum.)

Another issue that I have with moviefying the show, is that a lot of the smaller moments and single episodes with some good charming meat to them tend to get ignored in favour of the larger arcs. Yes, we’re faced with the challenge that what was essentially an episodic anthology show at its outset became more focused and arc-structured by its end - and indeed where it ended up has become much more relevant to the future of the franchise (Ahsoka, Mandalore, Maul, the Bad Batch, etc) - but there was certainly a charm to some of the ‘wilderness’ feeling of some of those smaller episodes. Mandalorian has this too, with some of its smaller, near-standalone episodes, really just being valuable texture for the world. And I’d like to get some of that feeling of this being a large-scale long-term war on many fronts back.

Now, I understand the momentum to shift these episodes into movies, since movies are Star Wars’ most culturally dominant format. But I recently saw that NumeralJoker has been cutting together some of the arcs simply as complete arcs - however long those arcs are - as part of his 4K AI Upscaling project. And that made me realise that - for me at least - there’s no real need for movie-length episodes of this series. (Also, regarding NumeralJoker’s edits: They look absolutely gorgeous, but he hasn’t made any edits to the content, leaving the arcs with some of the pacing and story quality issues mentioned above.)

Consider the Mandalorian. Last Friday we all watched an episode which was only 32 minutes long, and we enjoyed it as much as some of the movies. Episodes of the Mandalorian are as long or as short as they need to be.

So here’s the plan:

Start from the chronological ordering of episodes, split into arcs (49 by my count - some of which are single 22-minute episodes, and some of which are four or more episodes long). These arcs become our new episodes.
Exclude any arcs which are both bad stories and not relevant to the core plots of the show (Bridging eps 2-3 in terms of world and movie characters, Ahsoka, Maul, Mandalore)
Replace as many episodes as possible with NumeralJoker’s 4K arcs
Replace any arcs with decent edits produced by other editors (sometimes splitting a movie back down into its constituent arcs if it’s been edited well). One that I’ll almost definitely use is Smudger’s first. I’ve been reviewing the original TCW movie and the Hutt Baby arc is just awful, and Smudger absolutely nailed it with his replacement.
Cut the remaining episodes into their arcs
Edit the arcs now on quality of story, paying no attention to length. The goal, as with the Mandalorian, is to simply produce the best possible end-to-end story with the available material. If some arcs naturally merge into nearer movie length episodes then allow them to do this - though I suspect that Smudger’s first movie was bottled lightning. On the flipside, don’t merge arcs just because they have the same characters - pay attention to the pacing of the whole, as a series.
Review any particularly decent cut content, to see if it can be reincorporated with any other episode in an elegant way
Make any changes necessary to better pace the series as a whole
Package it all up, also including the Tartakovsky show up front (in 4K, thanks again NumeralJoker), the Son of Dathomir Audio Comic (by Star Wars Audio Comics and The Lore Master), and maybe an optional mix of Siege of Mandalore with an edit of ROTS which closely respects TCW (I’ll either use someone else’s or make this myself).
What does this produce, at the end? A TV series which presents the most and best of the clone wars - an episodic story of the changes to the characters and the world which bridge Episodes 2 and 3, whilst setting up the key elements which become the core of its emotional finale and relevant to the stories which follow in other shows and movies.

It’s certainly ambitious. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.