Earlier this month, Lucasfilm gave us the surprising news that Rian Johnson, director of the forthcoming “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” would be starting a brand new “Star Wars” trilogy from scratch and that it wouldn’t be related to the original Skywalker story. Details are being kept hush-hush at the moment, we don’t know necessarily where this latest trilogy would take place nor do we know if any familiar characters would be jumping into this latest vision of the franchise.
Well, it seems like neither does Johnson. His pitch to Lucasfilm's Kathleen Kennedy had no story:
"It came about because we were getting to the end of making this and again, I knew I wasn’t doing the next one. And I had had a really good time not just making this movie, but working with Kathy and also working with Disney, working with Bob Iger, Alan Horn, and Alan Berg. And we just had just a really good experience. And we were all…it was like last week of senior year. We were cleaning out our lockers. And all getting kind of sad. And saying, how do we keep working together? And that I threw out, I said, the most interesting thing to me would be a new trilogy, one story told over three movies. Go new places, meet new folks, come up with a new story to tell in the Star Wars universe. The sky’s the limit. That sounds thrilling. And they really responded to that. So we’re off, yeah."
Johnson was originally rumored to be Lucasfilm’s top choice to direct ‘Episode IX,’ after Colin Trevorrow left the project earlier in the year (J.J. Abrams took over the gig). It did make sense that Johnson would be in contention, as it appears that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has been very happy with how “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” turned out. Johnson has also suggested in the past that he’d love to take on another “Star Wars” film — but a whole trilogy? We didn’t see that coming.
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” opens on December 15th.
[/Film]