Last month Lucasfilm announced that Episode VIII director Rian Johnson would be overseeing the development of a brand new trilogy of Star Wars films set outside the scope of the Skywalker saga already established by George Lucas. Disney and Lucasfilm apparently feel Johnson is the right person to usher in this new trilogy of films given his exemplary work on The Last Jedi (we’ll all be finding out for ourselves just how amazing Episode VIII is in less than 2 weeks).
No official timetable has been announced for the release of the first film in Johnson’s new trilogy.
Johnson has just begun to scratch the surface on creating his new trilogy set in that GFFA and has reiterated to IGN that he has total control over the direction these new films will be heading.
“Right now there’s all the freedom in the world,” he told IGN while promoting Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “That’s the whole thing that’s exciting to me is let’s go some new places, let’s meet some new folks, let’s see what else is out there. Let’s have one story told over three films in this galaxy with no limitations. It’s pretty exciting.”
Johnson believes the positive experience he has had working with the top brass at Disney and Lucasfilm on The Last Jedi is a primary driving force in wanting to continue that partnership into the future.
“We all just had a really good time working together,” Johnson said of why he thinks he was tasked with continuing the Star Wars legacy in this major way. “I know for us, that was a big part of it. We were getting to the end of it and Kathy Kennedy and Bob Iger and Alan Horn, Alan Berkman, all the folks at Disney, we were just sad that this was coming to an end. We were like, ‘How do we figure out some way to keep working together?’ That’s when I pitched the idea of a new trilogy with a new story. That seemed really exciting for me.”
