Star Wars Celebration is in full-swing and Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy spoke with TheHollywoodReporter about their future film plans revealing they will be looking towards the next saga along with the next ten years of Star Wars films.
“We knew we were going to close this up, we knew that even before we started The Force Awakens,” Kennedy told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday at Star Wars Celebration in Chicago.
“We are looking at the next saga. We are not just looking at another trilogy, we’re really looking at the next 10 years or more,” Kennedy said.
“This [movie] is the culmination of the Skywalker Saga; it’s by no means the culmination of Star Wars,” said Kennedy. “I’m sitting down now with Dan Weiss and David Benioff…and Rian Johnson. We’re all sitting down to talk about, where do we go next? We’ve all had conversations about what the possibilities might be, but now we’re locking it down.”
A summit at Lucasfilm to look at the next wave of Star Wars projects is happening next month according to Kennedy, there is an assumption that Johnson, Benioff, and Weiss will be there for it. It’ll be interesting if either of these string of movies will take place thousands of years in the past with The Old Republic era giving the filmmakers plenty of wiggle room to create something brand new in the Star Wars universe and enough time from the Skywalker Saga to sever a lot of the ties to the other films.
David Benioff/Dan Weiss will have their final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones begin airing this Sunday and Rian Johnson will be releasing his crime thriller Knives Out on November 27th. While promoting Knives Out at CinemaCon 2019 in Las Vegas, Rian reaffirmed his involvement with his new Star Wars films after rumors started circulating that suggested he had left the project.
Disney’s head Bob Iger spoke with Blomberg about a possible hiatus after the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker but doesn’t seem to clarify if that was for main saga movies or all movies. Blomberg sadly didn’t prompt the statements or ask any follow-up questions about their film plans.
“We have not announced any specific plans for movies thereafter,” Iger said in a Bloomberg Television interview Thursday. “There are movies in development, but we have not announced them.”
“We will take a pause, some time, and reset,” he said, “because the Skywalker saga comes to an end with this ninth movie. There will be other Stars Wars movies, but there will be a bit of a hiatus.”
There have been rumors that filming on the next Star Wars movie could take place between this fall and next summer, so we’ll see how long that “hiatus” will actually be.
Bob Iger has confirmed months ago that due to the high costs involved with making Star Wars movies that they won’t be making films for the Disney+ platform and will be instead focusing on television for streaming. So, fans might want to curb expectations that Star Wars movies will be shot for Disney+.
On the TV side of things, The Mandalorian will begin airing November 12th on Disney+ and Kathleen Kennedy has revealed at Disney’s Investors Day that their untitled Cassian Andor series has already begun production earlier this year starring Diego Luna as Cassian and Alan Tudyk back as K-2SO. There are other shows expected to be announced in the future that might be hinted to during The Mandalorian panel at Star Wars Celebration 2019 in Chicago this Sunday.
The final chapter in the Skywalker Saga, Star Wars: The Rise of The Skywalker will be released on December 20th.
SOURCE: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
