Apparently, over on Youtube Korea there is a new Star Wars trailer out with some amazing new tidbits and details that we have not seen before. Here… just watch it, and tell me if your heart doesn’t come out of your chest like it did mine.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m certain that J.J. Abrams will do a great job setting up the mainline movies on a good trajectory. I’m really pretty excited about those. I’m pretty certain that Rian Johnson (Director of Looper, The Brothers Bloom, and 3 episodes of Breaking) will carry it forward well. But what I’m worried about here has nothing to do with quality. I am pretty content with everything we are seeing coming out of the production and marketing machines at Disney and Lucasfilm. The concern I’ve got right now I didn’t think I’d ever have… can we have too much Star Wars? There is a veritable arsenal of new books coming our way. There are amazing new video games coming. And there are the movies. If you don’t know, maybe we should quickly walk through right now what we know about the movies that are going to be coming.
There are to brands of movies coming our way in the Star Wars universe. There are the Main Sequels – 7, 8, and 9. Episode 8 will be coming out almost exactly 40 years to the day that Star Wars originally released. (Which was May 25th, 1977… so VIII will hit the big screen on May 26th, 2017. Which gives me shivers just thinking about… but enough about me and my goosebumps.) Following that logic, that means IX will be out in May of 2020.
But there are also Anthology movies in the works. ANTHOLOGY MOVIES? What is that? Great question. They are supposed to be stand alone movies, very similar to the books, which aren’t tied into the main Star Wars trilogy (trilogies?) timelines. The first movie in the anthologies timeline will be Rogue One. It will be directed by Gareth Edwards of the 2014 “Godzilla” reboot. And it has a release date of December 16th 2016. Rogue One will follow the X-Wing squadron with the same name and will be about their adventures.
But the most talked about Anthology movie has always been the Bobba Fett movie… which seems like a stupid idea to me. But, everyone loves Bobba Fett for some reason. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Fett hater. Regardless… but when Josh Trank (Director of the worst reviewed and rated super hero movie of all time, The Fantastic Four) started exhibiting weird behavior on the set of Fantastic Four he was pulled from the project. He contests this, and says that he walked of his own volition. But whatever. All we care about is, what happened to to the movie? Well, apparently a new director is being sought out.
The movie most being talked about in the Anthology series is actually a new one to gain traction, and that is a movie about Han Solo. My first thought was… wait, WHAT? But right now, the Han Solo movie is on the docket to be released in December of 2018… three years after Episode VII is release, and a year and a half after VIII is released. Which means that Disney is trying to do a main movie, and then another Anthology film in between.
Does that not seem like a TON of Star Wars over the next ten years? Maybe not. The Star Wars universe is such a great place to play… maybe it can handle that kind of saturation. But will a Han Solo movie stand up to scrutiny? Or will we end up with a Jupiter Ascending on our hands? (Oh good lord was that movie bad. I plan to do a tear down on that thing here soon… it is a fascinating study of what can go wrong in a movie.) I don’t think so. It won’t be panned like Jupiter or Carter. But it may make audiences tired. We’ll just have to see if Disney’s plans to milk the world breaks it. I’m definitely going to be there for the ride, that is for sure. I mean, did you watch that trailer? It was amazing. Actually, I’m watching it again now. Go away. I’m busy.