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Filmmaker Colin Trevorrow will not direct Star Wars: Episode IX:
Star Wars: Episode IX needs a new director. Lucasfilm has announced that Jurassic World filmmaker Colin Trevorrow is leaving the project. [...] Playwright Jack Thorne, best known for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, was recently hired to do a comprehensive rewrite of the Episode IX script by Trevorrow and his Safety Not Guaranteed co-screenwriter Derek Connolly.
While the nature of the disagreement with Lucasfilm isn't clear, there have been rumblings of discontent for several months. During that time, Trevorrow also suffered withering reviews for his passion project, The Book of Henry, which was a critical and commercial calamity.
Although Lucasfilm's new movies have found immense success at the box office and with audiences and critics, the process of working with directors on the new saga and spin-offs has occasionally been fraught. Chronicle filmmaker Josh Trank was set to direct an unspecified stand-alone movie (believed to be a Boba Fett project) before parting ways amid chaos on the recent Fantastic Four movie. And The LEGO Movie directors Phil Miller and Chris Lord were removed from the young Han Solo film and replaced with veteran Ron Howard amid disputes over the state of that project.
Star Wars IX was planned for release on May 24, 2019. Star Wars: The Last Jedi comes out on December 15, 2017.
Also at The Hollywood Reporter (discussion). Lucasfilm statement.
Safety Not Guaranteed or Steins;Gate?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @09:11PM (11 children)
The prequels were bad enough, but now Disney is just doing a cash grab and following the current trend of hitting people's nostalgia buttons. That trend was pretty much over when ep7 landed, and that movie paired with their marketing Armageddon paved over the grave of nostalgia with solid gold.
I have a feeling that these directors came on board with lofty ideas about making Star Wars exciting again, but then the market droids hammered them into compliance.
This century will be a wonderful source of rationale about why copyright is an archaic and counter productive system. "But how will someone get paaaaid???" Evolve you trolls! Humanity has reached a turning point, we have the resources and ability to lift humanity up. So will we improve our species as a whole? Or will we continue down this privatized road of haves and have nots?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @09:21PM
+1, Like!, :thumbs_up:
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:26PM (5 children)
Yes. How dare they give people what they actually want? People should be made to suffer through movies because... reasons!
In my mind, they did what they needed to with Episode 7. Specifically, they made a very vanilla, derivative, "let's do Star Wars: A New Hope all over again" story. They had to. The prequels had jaded people too much and made it clear that clear that Star Wars had lost its way. They needed to do a very by-the-book predictable story to prove they understood the franchise, such that when they started taking risks (such as "Rogue One") people would know it was an artistic choice rather than incompetence.
As the saying goes, "Only Nixon could have gone to China." Only after Disney proved they have geek-credentials can they start pushing boundaries with Star Wars.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:35PM (4 children)
Force Awakens was weak. They couldn't even come up with an original origin planet. "Look, it's Tatooine, but with a giant crashed star destroyer on it!" And speaking of said crashed star destroyer, clearly it makes much more sense to build a tiny hut and shelters with scraps of cloth stretched between a couple of poles, and drag heavy crates of parts back and forth from the wreck, than to live in the wreck and have all the parts be right there. And we're supposed to believe that the morons who do that are capable of space travel.
Even the villain Kylo Ren was a pussy. When Darth Vader first came on scene in the original it scared the crap out of you. Kylo Ren was a simpering teenager.
They needed to do so much more to revive the franchise. They should have hired Steven Moffat to write the script, and del Torro or Peter Jackson to direct it. They could have built the spine of a revitalized universe with an infinite number of spin-offs and merchandizing opportunities.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @11:38PM (1 child)
Peter Jackson would be awful. He would have stretched the prequels into three movies even though there was really only enough material for one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @12:23PM
You are telling us there's material for only one 2 hour movie in lord of the rings or hobit?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mykl on Thursday September 07 2017, @01:21AM (1 child)
I enjoyed The Force Awakens. I agree that the script was not Oscar-worthy, however I think you'll find that's true of A New Hope as well.
It was a little disappointing that there was yet another Death Star to destroy, but it didn't seem to be a problem for everyone that 2/3 of the original trilogy involved destroying Death Stars. As parent says, demonstrating that this won't be as bad as Eps 1-3 was important if they were going to win back the public's trust.
Here are some things that I don't want to see in Eps 8 and 9:
OK, I think I'm done.
(Score: 1) by Kawumpa on Friday September 08 2017, @07:04AM
That is not too surprising considering that it's basically the same script.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:27PM
I saw the two new ones a couple days ago on the condition that they were pirated and Disney wouldn't see a dime. Glad I did that. The Force Awakens was remarkably bad. Each scene was barely strung together with the next. JJ Abrams should be ashamed. It is only in contrast to the prequels that anyone could consider them "good."
Rogue One was OK, but it wasn't really a Star Wars movie.
Also, both suffered from a lack of Gungans.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:30PM
I would like to cut off two of the more common replies when discussing post-monetary society. a) money will obviously still be around, just much less central to general society and b) people want to be useful and with technological advances we simply don't need every human to be working 8+ hours a day.
It isn't a flip-of-the-switch transition, but it helps to know where we're trying to get to!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:38PM (1 child)
Well, that depends. Are enough people willing to think outside the box and stop playing along with the system that is? Are we willing to countenance other ways to win our material needs and deal with each other?
I think we can, but we're not gonna get there in one hop and most people will languish for an infinite time rather than change.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @01:34AM
Are enough people willing to think outside the box and stop playing along with the system that is?
Ah so blood it is then.