Via Rollingstone.com:
There are at least four new Star Wars films currently on the horizon – beginning with the December 18th arrival of Episode VII: The Force Awakens – and according to a new article, that’s only the beginning of the cinematic universe Disney plans on creating out of George Lucas’ brainchild. Wired writes that – like Marvel and the DC Comics’ billion-dollar movie franchises – Disney and Lucasfilm hope to eventually deliver a new Star Wars film to audiences on an annual basis, with no end in sight.
That’s where the title of the article – You Won’t Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie – kicks in: Disney’s plans for the franchise are so expansive – including, potentially, a new film every year as long as the box office demand is still there – that those who actually witnessed Star Wars in movie theaters in 1977 will likely shuffle off their mortal coil before the saga ultimately scrolls its last end credits.
“Star Wars is its own genre,” Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and assisted on The Force Awakens, told Wired. “Like all genres, it can hold a million different kinds of artists and stories. They say ‘Buddha is what you do to it.’ And that’s Star Wars. It can be anything you want it to be.”
And unlike its Marvel counterpart – which can only carry on for as long as franchise centerpiece Robert Downey Jr. agrees to portray Iron Man before a reboot is required – the possibilities are endless for Star Wars. The saga literally has an entire universe to draw stories from, and they’re not tethered to any time frame; the December 2016 anthology film Rogue One takes place right before the events that were the catalyst of the original 1977 film.
“In the case of Rogue One, we’re essentially making a period piece,” Lucasfilm Story Group’s Kiri Hart told Wired. “The benefit of making additional episodes that move forward on the timeline is that we are making new space for ourselves.”
In addition to the new trilogy and Rogue One, Disney and Lucasfilms are reportedly also working on prequel films dedicated to a pair of the original trilogy’s most beloved characters, Han Solo and Boba Fett.
