How to get around the 3-episode prequel limit

I think part of the problem with the prequels is that three films was just not enough time to properly tell Anakin’s story.
But Lucas started off numbering the films with TESB, with roman numerals.

How could the prequels have consisted of more than three films without ruining the Episode system or confusing people?
I was thinking what if the first film was Episode 0 but that wouldn’t work for two reasons. First being roman numerals don’t have a zero, and second, it would be detrimental to marketing purposes. The second film would be called “Episode 1”, third film “Episode 2” and so on.

Any ideas?

Aside from removing the episode numbers from the OT or – more ludicrously – going with decimal numbers, I can’t think of a way.

Among the many complaints I’ve heard (and made) about the prequels, I think “they were too short!” is a new one.

Voss Caltrez said:

I think part of the problem with the prequels is that three films was just not enough time to properly tell Anakin’s story.
But Lucas started off numbering the films with TESB, with roman numerals.

How could the prequels have consisted of more than three films without ruining the Episode system or confusing people?
I was thinking what if the first film was Episode 0 but that wouldn’t work for two reasons. First being roman numerals don’t have a zero, and second, it would be detrimental to marketing purposes. The second film would be called “Episode 1”, third film “Episode 2” and so on.

Any ideas?

I’d first make a film called The Republic: A Star Wars Story and move to Episode I after that.

And I don’t know why, but the idea of roman numerals not having a zero makes me laugh.

Sluggo said:

And I don’t know why, but the idea of roman numerals not having a zero makes me laugh.

I laugh at any culture which failed to conceive of “0”.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Sluggo said:

And I don’t know why, but the idea of roman numerals not having a zero makes me laugh.

I laugh at any culture which failed to conceive of “0”.

Well it’s not that the Romans didn’t know that 0 was a thing, they just didn’t create a symbol for it because of the philosophical question of “how could nothing be something?”
It seems so obvious to us now, but this was a real debate back then.

I blame the Mayans. They had the concept of zero but they didn’t bother to conceive of transatlantic sailing; if they had, the number would been introduced to the Old World sooner and the Gregorian calendar would have a year zero today.