Via Geek.com:

News comes this morning from internet scoopsters Latino Review that the director for Star Wars: Episode IX is a familiar face — one that most of us weren’t expecting to see return to the franchise. That’s right, JJ Abrams will probably be the director of the bookending movies in the new Star Wars trilogy from Disney.
Back when JJ Abrams was hired as the director to helm Star Wars: Episode VII (now The Force Awakens), it was pretty obvious to see why the mouse house chose him. The man had both worked with the notorious prickly Solo, Harrison Ford (Regarding Henry) and had built his own version of a popular Star-titled story world on top of the bones of a classic (Star Trek in 2008, less so with sequel Star Trek Into Darkness). Abrams had been producing TV and movies through his company Bad Robot and the production company itself had become a name we could sling around to build prestige.
Then, Disney gave Abrams the Star Wars directing job and a draft of the existing Star Wars: Episode VII that he absolutely hated. Now, this is just rumbling and rumor (and the stuff of another author’s future book, no doubt), but supposedly the early Michael Ardnt-penned draft of the script was too focused on the Skywalker children and not close enough to the Star Wars that JJ was envisioning. It was announced that Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan (writer, The Empire Strikes Back), were taking over writing duties on the new movie and there were rumors that Abrams wanted to push the release date of Episode VII into 2016 against Disney’s wishes. Everything publicly was done to make a schedule, when the rumblings were that the first script just wasn’t something JJ thought would be good for Star Wars.

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