I’m glad you liked that idea, Ice! I was hoping to have a ROTJ edit with this idea implemented by this month for the 40th anniversary of its release, but life has gotten in the way unfortunately. I’ve sort of lost interest in personally editing any of the other movies or shows (still like chiming in ideas though!), but really the only film I’d like to make a fan edit of at this point is this one.
The cool thing about the Boba working for Vader idea is that it can implemented very heavily, or very lightly, depending on how conservative you wanted the edit to be. So you could have this scene between Vader and Boba, which makes their motivations clear and creates a better segue between the Vader opening and the Tatooine first act, but you also could just give Boba one line in the palace. When Luke falls into the pit, you can have Boba say to Jabba, “He’s no good to me dead” or with voice AI “Vader wants him alive”, and then Jabba could reply “The Jedi’s mine!” Or something like that. But if Jabba, in his greed, ignores Boba request, it would add more reason as to why Boba just lets shit hit the fan on the sail barge. Anyway, there’s a lot of little things you could do to beef up Boba’s role in the first act which I think enhances what’s already in the film pretty nicely.
The other two big changes I would like to do would be to make the second Death Star feel more inevitable rather than repetitive, and of course improve the Ewok plot. But with new tech like voice AI and what not, it adds a lot of potential for a future ROTJ edit. Like Omni mentioned, you finally could get a solid version of the “Your mother once thought as you do” line. I remember how much of a struggle we had trying to make that work back in 2018. The AStarWarsStory YouTube channel also used voice AI to replace the dialogue for the deleted sandstorm scene, which would be cool to see in an edit.
Again, there is a lot of potential, but I do struggle with trying to find a balance between a conservative approach and a radical edit. Like, where is the line for a classic film like Return of the Jedi? Sometimes I feel like if you were to make really radical changes, you should just go all in and make a “Revenge of the Jedi” edit that tries to progressively make the trilogy more mature by going with a darker tone for this film, rather than the happily ever after ending we got. Not trying to “improve” the film, but just making an alternate version. Otherwise, you should just add to the film rather than heavily restructure or cut from the it (Again, with the one exception being some parts of the Ewok plot imo). Still trim from here and there, but maybe add to the film more than take away. Not saying this is how it should be done, just my philosophy.