This marks a major change from what everyone THOUGHT the next Star Wars movie was going to be.
Once this December’s Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker comes and goes, that is it for the Skywalker saga.
To be fair, nine movies about one family (and all the planets that have been destroyed along the way) is more than enough, and Disney and LucasFilm had decided to move things on in new directions.
We’d known for a while now that they were so happy with how Episode XIII: The Last Jedi turned out that they’d given that movie’s writer/director Rian Johnson his own brand new trilogy to make.
Then, when Disney released their upcoming slate for the majority of the next decade, and the Decembers in 2022, 2024, and 2026 have all been earmarked for Star Wars movies, we assumed that they’d be the Johnson trilogy entries.
However, while he was speaking at the MoffetNathanson Media & Communications summit (sounds like a real blast!), Walt Disney Company chairman Bob Iger made the following statement:
“We did a deal with David Benioff and D.B Weiss, who are famous for Game of Thrones, and the next movie that we release will be theirs. And we’re not saying anything more about that.”
There had been talk that Benioff and Weiss wouldn’t get to Star Wars for a while yet, as they’d already committed to executive producing another show for HBO, which was due to premiere in late 2019.
However, that show turned out to be Confederate, which told an alternative timeline in which the American Civil War ended with a stalemate and slavery still existed, and it was met with such a harsh reaction that the hashtag #NoConfederate trended number one in the United States for several days.
Since then, all talk of Confederate has gone quiet, so perhaps HBO have decided to shelve that, and now that Benioff and Weiss have some unexpected free time, a new Star Wars is the way to go.
Although considering the reaction to the most recent episode of Game Of Thrones, maybe that isn’t such a good thing, either.
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