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: 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.