I've been of the opinion for a while that they simply need to do another Star Wars series instead of re-treading the existing story.
When you get down to it, Star Wars was pretty much the same thing as the remake of Battlestar Galactica, just more upbeat, and less heavy handed. It's a universe of prophecy where an all powerful "force" guides people through cycles of good, evil, and balance, using those it favors as it's tools. Indeed a big part of the entire story as spelled out in the prequels is how Anakin is prophecied to "bring balance to the force" and the good guys naively fail to realize that if good is pretty much dominant, balance doesn't mean taking down the now re-appearing bad guys. What's more it's also Papaltine's downfall, after all Anakin wasn't here to "bring darkness" either. When he's done he's basically killed all the good guys AND the bad guys, leaving one mixed up pseudo-Jedi (Luke) who could arguably go either way.... no seriously, think about it. It's also kind of a downer when you realize that if this is about the end of an era of good... it means that despite our little Ewok celebration the bad guys are eventually going to win this one (one way or another), whether that's from Luke turning evil, corruption in the new Republic, or the success of Imperial remnants is not something that it goes into, choosing to end on a high note. To be honest I think when George realized how his work was being received, he decided to try and re-do it to be more straightforward good vs. evil as much as he could, and wanted to make it more uniformly upbeat.
At any rate, what this means is that Star Wars is an ideal property to re-visit all the same ideas and the basic sequence of events, in another timeline. It could be the past or the future, ideally if they did it right it wouldn't be specified because it doesn't matter to the endless cycle (and truthfully one could argue that "The Force" itself might conspire indirectly to keep technology on the same basic level, and answer that question). Done correctly you could change a lot of the specifics, with the same basic events happening, and sort of show what it might look like with a more modern cast and point of view, with it still being canon.
The big question is whether people would really "get" that even if it was explained while the moving was being made.
To be honest, while it goes beyond the scope of a "remake" covering the same material, I've always thought doing the "cycle" idea in reverse would be kind of cool. Have a series where your basic evil Sith empire has already won, it dominates everything, people are being raped and tortured to death in the streets, planets exploited, 99% of the people are serfs, and the leaders live like god kings. Pretty much the opposite of "The Republic". Instead of having some Sith (which nobody remembers exactly what it is) worm his way in whie the force goes cloudy, have some repentant young noble find the teaching of these "Jedi" fellows and undermine the bad guys from within the system, while engaging in "Scarlet Pimpernel"
like heroics. Basically a role reversal with Papaltine as the great hero. At the end he dies heroically, tears down the empire, but leaves a rather mixed up prodigy-anti-hero behind to carry the torch. It would be kind of cool just to have a bunch of Sith sitting around in Dark Council pondering a propecy and the "Mystery Of The Jedi" (wait, didn't we kill all of them in a war thousands of years ago?).
