In comic books, nobody is ever “really” gone and its just kind of accepted, even expected that an important “dead” character isn’t really dead forever. Anything can happen. It was a clone/robot/twin… time travel. Deus Ex Machina. Some super power we didn’t know about lets him come alive. It was a hallucination. Or maybe there’s a multi-verse and the one you saw was just one of many variations of the character.

Or just flat out he’s back and no explanation is given, it just is.

But in movies that are supposedly part of the same story we demand a little more, and yet… lazy writing.

But yes, Boba Fett, Darth Maul, Palpatine, they all died in those movies and were meant to be dead. But other people wanted them to come back or the original creators changed their minds, and so boom, they are back, dead again, etc.

I highly doubt Lucas “regretted it.” He only would regret any money he might have lost, but that’s not even an issue to me. If people love a character and didn’t want him to die, then killing the character reveals that, and the “come back” can generate even more hype and make even more money, right? Killing off the character multiple times can “cheapen” the comeback however. The stakes are lowered if we just assume that any character is probably going to come back sooner or later, by some convenience or ridiculous re-write.

At least in the old matinee serials they would show “last time on…” footage showing how the good guy escaped or substituted the dummy or put on the bullet proof vest at the last second (even though this footage wasn’t show in the previous episode, we clearly saw the thing they were in blow up).

Yes, it’s harder to duplicate that within a movie itself (infamously done in Rise of Skywalker with Chewbacca or the various slo mo “death fake outs” used in the LOTR trilogy).