Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy has admitted that the braintrust behind the future of the Star Wars franchise still hasn’t quite decided which Anthology tale will follow last year’s Rogue One and the impending Han Solo spin-off, but has revealed that a decision will be made in the next couple of weeks. In fact, Kathleen Kennedy admitted that they will have made their choice by the end of June.
“We haven’t identified [the story yet] yet. We have a couple of things right now that we’re circling, and we’ll make a decision between the two pretty shortly. It’s probably for 2020, and we will make a decision by June.”
There have been a hoard of rumors regarding the potential new Star Wars film, and which legendary character it will revolve around. What we do know for certain is that a brand new Anthology film will be released in 2020, while the still-untitled Han Solo Anthology film will arrive in cinemas on May 25, 2018. Back in 2014 it was announced that Josh Trank would be directing a spin-off Star Wars film, and it was believed that this movie would revolve around the character of, and provide a back-story for, Bobba Fett.
However, the tremendous failure of The Fantastic Four back in 2015, and the speculation that Josh Trank had struggled to handle such a big blockbuster, ultimately led to Trank being dropped from the project. Since then, there has been heavy speculation that the undecided Star Wars anthology film would revolve around Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was portrayed by Alec Guinness in Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope and then Ewan McGregor in the Star Wars prequels.
Kathleen Kennedy also discussed the relief that the Lucasfilm team felt after the success of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which grossed over $1.056 billion at the box office and was met with sterling reviews, too. The Lucasfilm president explained that because of the success of Rogue One, and the fact that audiences took to the new set of characters so willingly, the studio now feel liberated by the creative options ahead of them.
“There is a palpable sense of relief. For the first time, I think we can step outside of this a little bit and take stock, and ask ourselves, ‘What are the next steps? Where are we going?’ It was really the release of Rogue One , because we knew we were moving on with the trilogy, but we didn’t know exactly how these Star Wars stories would be received. We didn’t want to create confusion, either. So it is a relief to see that people really embraced Rogue One , and they now know that we’re creating these new stories that could fall anywhere on the timeline and don’t necessarily have anything to do with the saga. From a creative point of view, that’s really liberating.”
While Kathleen Kennedy made these comments to Vanity Fair earlier this week, Slash Film reported back in March that Bob Iger had informed a crowd at USC’s Marshall School Of Business that the studio had plans for the franchise all the way through to 2032, as he insisted that they have “another decade and a half of Star Wars stories.”
“We’re just starting to talk about what happens to Star Wars after [Episode] 9. It’s way too early, and certainly nothing that I can reveal, but we’ve got a creative team actually thinking about what could be another decade and a half of Star Wars stories. It’s kind of mind-blowing to spend an afternoon with a creative team talking about that. Where could you go, where should we go?”
The next of these films will arrive on December 15 of this year, as this is when Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released, while Han Solo will follow in May, 2018, and then Star Wars 9 will hit cinemas on 2019.
[Featured Image by Gerardo Mora /Getty Images]