Via Comingsoon.net:
We’re a little over three months away from the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and just a few days away from the release of the first toys from the movie. Everyone of all ages, men and women, both older fans and new, are getting super excited for the return of Luke, Leia and Han Solo, as well as the introduction of a new generation of characters, and so far, Lucasfilm has done a pretty good job keeping things under wraps and just teasing everyone enough which should allow The Force Awakens to be huge.
A year later, we’ll get the first of the spin-off movies, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which we know even less about, and then five months after that, we’ll get Rian Johnson’s still untitled Star Wars: Episode VIII. A year after that, we get the second anthology movie based on Han Solo and then Colin Trevorrow’s Episode IX in 2019. Setting that last one aside, that’s four Star Wars franchise movies over the next two-and-a-half years, and as suggested in the title, I wonder whether Disney/Lucasfilm can sustain fan excitement for so many movies, especially once the story began in J.J. Abrams’ movie will come to a conclusion (presumably) in Episode IX?
Basically, that’s the overarching question that encompasses a whole lot of smaller questions—many which we can’t answer right now but ones that we should bear in mind if we want to start looking ahead and beyond The Force Awakens.
At this point, we don’t even know if any of the three actors from the original Star Wars will be around through however many more episodes are done—the idea is to do another trilogy—so will fans like the new characters introduced to follow them through more movies? Will the spin-off movies fare as well considering that they won’t include all the actors they know and love playing the characters?
I’m sure important questions like that have gone through many minds over at Lucasfilm and Disney after the bombshell purchase announcement of October 2012, and we’ve had to wait three full years to see the fruits of that enormous deal.
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