It was announced last week that Colin Trevorrow will no longer direct Star Wars: Episode IX. In finding his replacement, Lucasfilm turned to a familiar face... J. J. Abrams:
J.J. Abrams, who launched a new era of Star Wars with The Force Awakens in 2015, is returning to complete the sequel trilogy as writer and director of Star Wars: Episode IX. Abrams will co-write the film with Chris Terrio. Star Wars: Episode IX will be produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Michelle Rejwan, Abrams, Bad Robot, and Lucasfilm.
The release date has been moved from May 24, 2019 to December 20, 2019.
Also at Entertainment Tonight. Here's another article about Trevorrow's firing.
Related Stories
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?
Lucasfilm "Licking Their Wounds" But Not Halting 'Star Wars' Development
Mild spoilers in TFA about certain characters that appear in the film.
Disney and Lucasfilm are reassessing their plans for future Star Wars movies in the wake of the disappointing performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is having to fight to make much more than $350 million worldwide, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. "They haven't slowed down development," says a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm's thinking, "but they are licking their wounds."
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and her team are regrouping and figuring out the direction of the movies beyond the final installment of the main series of films, Star Wars: Episode IX, which is scheduled for release Dec. 20, 2019. "It doesn't mean those spinoffs don't happen," says another insider of Solo's underperformance globally. "It just means they're trying to figure out how to make, and market, them differently."
[...] "They were developing anything and everything," says another exec. "It was a case of them stuffing so much sausage and not try to break the casing."
Meanwhile, Han Solo's blaster was sold for over 0.1% of the film's gross.
Also at Collider, Space.com, and Forbes (archive).
Related: Star Wars Franchise Loses Fourth Director in Two Years
Meet the New Star Wars IX Director: J. J. Abrams
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday September 13 2017, @02:30PM (3 children)
JJ was tasked with making a safe and solid relaunch of the franchise. I hope for the next one they can do something more interesting, take a couple of risks. I'm optimistic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @05:06PM (2 children)
Well, if Star Trek into Fail was any indication, expect a scene in the next movie with Finn or Rey or whoever is the new Han Solo (archetype) with whoever the love interest is. Then there will be a completely wooden re-enactment of "I love you" / "I know" done with the roles swapped. Everybody will coo about how great of an homage it is while those of us who care about art will be overcome with nausea!!!!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 13 2017, @05:10PM
That dialogue isn't succinct enough for the dynamic emoji generation [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:54PM
And yet it will be better than any Anakin/Padmé scene...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @02:34PM (31 children)
all the movies that he gets to direct wind up more or less the same
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 13 2017, @02:46PM (1 child)
That's sort of what you get when you use directors with cults of personality like his. Take Quentin Tarentino. Every single thing he does is the same. The story and characters are irrelevant, because it's all a Quentin Tarentino vehicle. Likewise M. Night Shyamalan, or Martin Scorcese.
Actors do that, too. Many of the most popular ones don't actually act. They're the same in everything. Look at Bruce Willis, he has one expression he uses for every movie he's in, from Die Hard to Mercury Rising, and it's not even as good a look as Blue Steel. Halle Berry, one look. Derek Zoolander, one look.
That's all fine if you like those particular actors or directors, but if you give greater weight to the story and its setting than you do the director or actors, it's going to sour you.
For me, the Force Awakens wasn't even as good as a JJ Abrams vehicle because it was so tenuously strung together. The scenes were paint by numbers, with the weight of the special effects pulling so hard the duck tape and hot glue holding them together became visible and threatened to tear.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:45AM
Whoa.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @02:52PM (23 children)
... I couldn't get enough movies; they were magic.
Then, as an adult, I got Netflix, and streamed hundreds of TV shows and movies, and I thought I'd found salvation.
However, eventually, I started to see patterns; I became really good at guessing what was going to happen ("She's pregnant, and he's the bad guy." "We're only 5 minutes in!". I was correct.). It's all so very boring now; I cannot imagine how people sit through the slew of "Superhero" movies (last time I went to see one, I spent most of the time admiring the murals on the dark theater's walls).
I've been ruined.
I'm like musical people who know all of the chord progressions, and see the repetition in all music. To them, it's all as boring as a kid practicing on his first set of drums.
In short, all movies are the same. There's nothing new to learn, and nobody wants to hear anything new anyway. I think that's why humans must die—death is an evolutionary advantage for the species as a whole, because new people aren't aware yet of the endless monotony that will consume their lives.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:14PM (6 children)
Not only the movies, all the stories, all the librettos, all the "suprise" political outcomes: when you have been alive for 2400 years, what you say is more true than you know. This is why fiction and entertainment have their limits. On the other hand, science is eternally fascinating. The progress of human knowledge of the universe is continually surprising, and that is what makes life worth living.
But the question at hand, JJ at the helm of Star Wars? Again? I think it was Stephen King who once wrote, "hell is all about repetition."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:36PM (2 children)
Here's an input, there's an output, now we can predict the relationship.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:25PM
This is why I have always thought that both computer science and behaviorist psychology, like JJ Abrahms, were big mistakes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 13 2017, @08:54PM
And sometimes the predictions turn out to be wrong. That is when it gets interesting.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:51AM (2 children)
When you were a child, had they invented dirt yet?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:06AM (1 child)
No, we only had sand. I refer you to the classic work on the topic: the Ψαμμίτης [blogspot.com] by Archimedes. Great read. He mentions me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:12PM
"Great read. He mentions me!"
You and The Orange One sound so much alike. Are you brothers from different mothers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:20PM (1 child)
i like what you wrote last! if you look at stories and movies as textual and visual programming tools, they tend to be walk us through how things fail and go wrong and have us judge them by how error handling was implemented. These well realized intentions sucks the life out of us and keep the fiction about how it all ends badly.
perhaps there's an ancient alien civilization on the planet which prompts all our imagination to go to a place where anything we would do or think or feel or experience or intend would have been something those guys had done before hibernating deep underground somewhere. whatever the cause, the negativity you describe is like a reflection in a mirror cabinet to me. it crowds out the joy of figuring things out for ourselves - and messes up our perspectives, as shown in the way your conclusion went. So, since that is all false, I sincerely hope that you don't believe your own senses or observations and make the world your own somehow!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:15PM
Star Trek: Enterprise, Season 1, episode 13, "Dear Doctor":
(I think my comment has broken the Irony Meter).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:35PM (11 children)
It's all so very boring now; I cannot imagine how people sit through the slew of "Superhero" movies
The problem is that modern movies suck at a much greater rate than they used to. Someone will probably cite whatever that Law is called that basically says "95% of everything is crap", that we only remember the good stuff from the past, etc. That's true, but today, in movies, that number has gone up so it's now 99.99% of everything is crap, so there isn't anything good coming out. I cite as evidence the fact that so many Hollywood movies now are remakes or franchise installments. In short, they're just not making any original movies any more. So no, it isn't like the past; back in the 70s, there was lots of new stuff: Star Wars and Alien, back then, were brand-new and revolutionary. Now, what do we have? More Star Wars and Alien installments, except they're not that great and the franchises are getting really old and tired.
My recommendation: don't bother with any modern movies unless the reviews really are so great that it's a guaranteed slam-dunk. Instead, watch old classics. If they're good, they won't get boring (unless you watch them too many times of course), and even if they're not *that* good, they're still fun to watch from a modern viewpoint.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:54PM (1 child)
Sturgeon's Law [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:31PM
There's so many new Laws in the Internet Age it's hard to keep them all straight: Sturgeon's Law, Poe's Law, Betteridge's Law, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:54PM (5 children)
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law [wikipedia.org]
Agreed that the constant remakes are getting stupid. Everybody is drunk on 'member berries. I'd at least like to see a proper remake of Fritz Lang's Metropolis if Hollywood absolutely needs to remake shit. The themes may be even more relevant today than they were in 1927.
Not all remakes are bad, however. Compare and contrast 1951's The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter's 1982 remake The Thing. Then compare and contrast 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers with 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With The Thing, the remake is superior. However, the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not nearly as good as the original.
A more modern example. From everything I've heard, the recently released remake of It is better than any previous attempts. (May not strictly be a remake depending on how you look at it.)
The problem is that Hollywood doesn't exist to create art. Occasionally they bankroll somebody who creates art, purely by chance. Hollywood exists to make money.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:37PM
Not all remakes are bad, however. Compare and contrast 1951's The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter's 1982 remake The Thing. Then compare and contrast 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers with 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With The Thing, the remake is superior. However, the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not nearly as good as the original.
What are you talking about? The '78 version is better, especially with the pod-people having the creepy scream. But both those versions are really very good in their own right. The '90 version isn't so great.
However, while you point out inadvertently that remakes are are not a very recent phenomenon, I contend that 1) they're FAR more common now than in decades past, and 2) when they were done in the past, the results were usually good, as seen by your examples. (I can't think of many great counter-examples, other than the '90 version of Body Snatchers, and even that wasn't horrible.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:39PM (3 children)
The problem is that Hollywood doesn't exist to create art. Occasionally they bankroll somebody who creates art, purely by chance. Hollywood exists to make money.
No, this isn't the problem at all. Hollywood has *always* existed to make money; that's nothing new. What's changed is that Hollywood is now far more risk-averse. They'd rather bankroll a remake or franchise installment because it's virtually guaranteed to make a profit, even if it isn't a huge profit, than a totally original production that could either totally flop or be a gigantic hit like 1977's Star Wars.
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:50PM (2 children)
... and I'd wager that this in turn is because the budget for an average film is now so much bigger and is funded in large part by external sources of capital.
In the old days of the studio system, all the money came from the studio - in effect a few individuals who were deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the business/industry - so they *could* take risks. Many of them went bankrupt as a result. Nowadays, (mainstream) films are funded largely by bond investors and banks, who naturally would like to see a more certain return on their money, given that the "upside" to their investment is "you get your money back". Those investors exert significant influence on which films get made and which don't. I'm sure that the studios have a much less variable bottom line as a result (though perhaps on average lower), but they do this by giving the audiences a large number of mediocre films instead of (at least financially) a few which do incredibly well and many which make a loss.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday September 13 2017, @11:31PM (1 child)
Yes but the trouble in turn is that the investors only seem to care about immediate, short term profits over the long term health of a franchise. They're happy to trash it and cheapen the brand as long as that one movie makes a profit. The same kind of short term approach goes for most other industries as well and for politics.
While we're talking about remakes (and reboots which are just as bad), I'm just waiting for them to remake E.T. They consider that movie sacred, but they'll still do it when they run out other things to redo.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:14AM
Yes - many investments are in individual movies not a franchise/studio/whatever so why would they care about the franchise value? There's no benefit to them because even if they have the opportunity to invest in the next movie in a franchise/series, they get little to no benefit from having invested in the previous movie(s) - so they are simply individual independent investment decisions.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:00PM (2 children)
Good movies are still made. Not all movies are made in Hollywood.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:21PM (1 child)
Good movies are still made. Not all movies are made in Hollywood.
1) Depends on what genre you're interested in. If you like sci-fi movies (the kind set in space, with spaceships, not stupid ones about some guy with an earpiece), you're not going to find any of that from Bollywood or small indie studios. You might occasionally find something interesting out of France [wikipedia.org] if you don't insist on it being in space, and don't mind it being incredibly weird.
2) As I mentioned, there's some pretty interesting movies coming out of other countries sometimes. "Let the Right One In" is a really excellent Finnish vampire movie, for instance, and the Swedish "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" movies were a big hit. But if you're an English-speaking American, you can probably only handle so much foreign-language cinema and having to read subtitles. It's fun and mind-enriching to see some of that, but it's not going to be something you'll want to do every single time you watch a movie, just like most Americans probably don't want to eat Indian food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week, though they might certainly enjoy it a lot a few times a month.
3) I did say that 99.99% of everything is crap, not 100%. That still leaves room for a good one once in a while. (I might have overstated the number too, 99% is probably more accurate, given the number of movies produced by Hollywood in a year.)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:39AM
The barrier to entry for quality CGI is falling and will fall even further. You'll see more of it from India [wikipedia.org] and other countries [wikipedia.org]. You'll see more of it on TV [wikipedia.org]. And eventually you'll see amateur filmmakers capable of making good looking feature-length projects using CGI. A single person could produce a computer-generated city/world. But with crowdfunding, amateurs can also get a hold of professional quality cameras and other equipment without relying on a single investor (not that you need pro cameras, an iPhone with a tripod might be sufficient).
So even if 99% of content is still crap (99.99% is obviously complete hyperbole, find 2-3 good shows or movies a year and you've more than busted past 1 in 10,000), there are growing means to get stories that would never be told by Hollywood distributed to a large audience (online). And they can have special effects.
(Before the inevitable reply: It's already understood that CGI alone doesn't make a film or show good. But it can expand the possibilities available for talented writers/directors/filmmakers to tell a compelling story.)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:41AM (1 child)
I'll concede that most movies are highly predictable and follow the same plot. However, there are still plenty of really good, thought-provoking films out there.
Go and hire Dancer in the Dark [imdb.com] starring Bjork. You'll want to turn it off after 15 minutes or so, but stick with it. IT IS WORTH IT. THIS MOVIE IS DIFFERENT.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday September 15 2017, @11:00PM
That movie is now 17 years old. A lot has changed in 17 years, keeping in mind that just a year prior, 1999 (which I consider a landmark year for movies) gave us Fight Club, Office Space, The Green Mile, October Sky, The Sixth Sense, and The Matrix.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday September 13 2017, @03:41PM (4 children)
Personally, while I thought the visual effects and score were very good, I also thought that "The Force Awakens" not only had a highly unimaginitive plot (a patchy rehash of "A New Hope", only without any character development or a logical plot, with the shortfalls made up with "bigger, better, more"), but was also a terrible film from the perspectives of production, direction, and editing - all of which were Abrams's responsibility. I have absolutely zero confidence that Episode IX will be any better, so why on Earth would I possibly want to go and see "The Last Jedi" given that it's almost certainly going to be bookended by films I didn't/probably won't enjoy?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:56PM (3 children)
I don't think any director, or any cast of actors, can salvage Star Wars after Force Awakens. They jumped the hyperspace shark sure as fuck when they chose that whiny little shit to be the new Darth, AND the new Deathstar just had to have hyperspace capable beam weapons that destroy multiple planets in one shot. They built a huge installation around an active star. Riiiiiiggggght.
That, and Han Solo and Chewbacca *lose* the Millenium Falcon. A whole movie could be made just about that, and I wouldn't believe it for a fucking second. Han might get old, but Chewbacca is still young as hell for a Wookie. They would not lose the Millenium Falcon. Force Awakens was pretty much a disaster from the beginning. I appreciated Rouge One a lot more.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:22PM (2 children)
Force Awakens was pretty much a disaster from the beginning. I appreciated Rouge One a lot more.
Rouge One? Is that a Star Wars movie about make-up or something?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday September 13 2017, @10:27PM (1 child)
Nope. Musical.
Chewbacca kills it on the drums.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:10AM
You are thinking of Going Rouge One, the version with Sarah Palin in it. Yes, Caribou Barbie played a Wookie!
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:19PM (2 children)
How is it that we only get one Starship Troopers movie but this Star Wars trash just keeps flowing? I think I'd even take a JJ interpretation of the Foundation series. Star Wars is very much over and dead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @11:51PM
Because Starship Troopers grossed less than $55 million [imdb.com], that's how.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:29AM
You actually got three starship troopers movies, but the two made-for-TV sequels were complete trash so nobody remembers them.