Moe_Syzlak said:
Yeah, that's the most astonishing news of the day.
Why astonishing, you ask? These guys have a great reputation, after all. Well, it's astonishing because one would think that Lucasfilm would wait for one trilogy to be done or at least partway through before announcing the next one. We're not even done with the sequel trilogy; Rian Johnson hasn't shot one frame of his follow-up trilogy; and now we've got
another trilogy announced beyond that.
(And the news I read made it clear that they aren't taking over Rian Johnson's trilogy; they're doing another new one.)
Meanwhile, we still don't have any official confirmation of the next standalone movie.
Variety announced back in August that they had heard rumblings of an Obi-Wan movie (the same ones announcing the GoT creators' trilogy). Variety has a very good reputation for accuracy, but the "sources" that they mentioned never made an official announcement.
We were expecting to hear an announcement about Obi-Wan or whatever the next standalone film turned out to be either way, but we just got crickets chirping. And then this news -- which no one was expecting -- gets a straight-up
confirmation on StarWars.com.
Mind you, none of this is bad -- just surprising.
I am starting to wonder if the next standalone has just simply been canceled at this point. It seems like it would have made more sense to continue doing standalones in between the trilogy installments. But maybe all the problems that
Rogue One and
Solo went through have caused Kathleen Kennedy to swear off any more standalones.
Of course, as with anything, one can see
potential issues, which are not the same as real concrete issues, just fun/interesting things to speculate about:
1) Rian Johnson is already known for turning in dark and gritty stories. Both
Looper and
TLJ fit that bill. I presume his new trilogy will be more of the same. Does it make sense to hire another creative team also known for making dark and gritty stories? It seems like it would make sense to do a different movie (or series of movies) with a lighter, more crowd-pleasing tone, since a lot of people associate that with
Star Wars more than the darker stuff.
It's possible that the GoT producers want to break from tradition and not be pigeonholed, deliberately choosing to do something lighter. But I assume part of the reason why Lucasfilm hired them in the first place is so they could basically market the movies as "
Star Wars done
Game of Thrones-style," which should pack people in the theater.
2) StarWars.com cites Benioff and Weiss as the creators of
Game of Thrones. While it's true that they developed the TV series, the actual creator of GoT is, of course, R. R. Martin. Benioff and Weiss have shown that they know how to adapt a story in a way that makes the fans happy, but this wouldn't be adaptation, it would be creating something new (although admittedly playing within a very well established fictional universe). I wonder how much difference that's going to make in the final product.
3) If they had been hired as the showrunners of the upcoming live-action TV series coming to Disney's new streaming platform, that would be less surprising to me. But apparently there's going to be a live-action TV show, another animated series following
Rebels, and
two new trilogies. As an old-school fan who's used to having to wait three years between installments and then decades between trilogies, I am a little concerned about viewer burnout. (To be fair, though, it used to feel like there weren't
enough Star Wars movies, and that certainly won't be a problem now.)
I must again heavily emphasize that these things pique my curiosity, but I'm not an angry raging fanboy about them. Metaphorically speaking, I just got told that Michael Jordan got hired for my favorite basketball team. That's a good thing, and I want to show a proper level of gratitude for that. My concerns are small, and hopefully none of them will be realized. I plan to keep an open mind. Everything mentioned above are just random thoughts that occurred to me when I first heard the announcement -- no more, no less.