Looking Forward to the Future of Star Wars

Some spoilers of the Rebels television show and the Solo film are in this, you were warned.

Ever since the release of The Rise of Skywalker (and a bit before), many Star Wars fans — as well as some casual filmgoers — have been debating to the ends of the earth the value of the Sequel Trilogy, the Prequel Trilogy, which directors actually love Star Wars, which ones simply took the paycheck. Although these discussions are usually quite interesting to me, they have now pretty much reached a dead end and simply devolve into circular arguments. So instead, I thought I would take a look at some of the announced or rumoured film and television projects, and talk about a couple of different ideas that I would like to see happen. Now some of these projects might end up being the same film, i.e. one talking about its setting and another talking about its director turning out to be the same film, so be wary that we might end up recovering ground during this.

First of all in the film section there is the potential of Rian Johnson returning to direct a film/trilogy of films. Initially this got pushed back due to Johnson finishing up on Knives Out but some speculate that this might not happen at all due to the divided opinion of The Last Jedi and some of the hate that people like Johnson and Kelly Marie Tran have experienced. I would hope that both Johnson and Disney are willing to go ahead with another film helmed by the former. As I’ve stated in my The Last Jedi piece, Johnson took the franchise in a new and interesting way and maybe it would’ve been better to either have given him a standalone film or an entire trilogy but what happened, happened and I think it gave us a great Star Wars film. They’ve already stated that it would have new characters and probably be in a new point of the timeline which makes complete sense for Johnson. Leave films with established characters and established periods (like The Old Republic) to others and let Johnson play around and do what he did with The Last Jedi but on a broader scale with a lot more freedom.

Another part of the film section is the continuation of the Anthology films, or the ‘A Star Wars Story’ films. So far we’ve only got Rogue One and Solo. And there would have been more but for the moment Disney have put these on hiatus. A Boba Fett film was one of the early rumours, supposedly initially intended to be released in this year. This sounds great, though can easily be ruined if not kept in the right style that fits the Mandalorian/Western feeling that the Outer Rim presents. If this film goes ahead, it looks good with the success of The Mandalorian live-action television series capturing that feeling/style perfectly. There’s also the rumour of Boba Fett actually appearing in season two of the Mandalorian which would make an Anthology film tie-in extremely possible and likely. Another rumour was a Yoda Anthology film. Initially, I thought that this would be a terrible idea and that it was something that shouldn’t happen until Lucasfilm announced that, after The Rise of Skywalker, the published works of the franchise would be focusing on an era they are calling ‘The High Republic’ which will be set a couple of hundred years before the events of the Prequel Trilogy. Although this probably would’ve been the era of time for a Yoda film to be set, it wasn’t until seeing the ideas and initial plans for what the time period will include that I changed my mind. As long as there’s plenty of new characters alongside Yoda, the film could potentially be a great edition to the Anthology collection. The final potential of Anthology films I will talk about is the Jabba film and the Mos Eisley film. I’m putting these both together as my thoughts about them boils down to the same point: It’s taking a side of Star Wars that people like and drawing the wrong conclusion. What people like about the scene in the Mos Eisley cantina and about the scenes with Jabba the Hutt isn’t those specific things but instead the atmosphere the scenes created and the storylines of many characters that were in those scenes. So instead of a Jabba the Hutt film, perhaps a Bounty Hunter film where the protagonist works for Jabba or is working against him. Instead of a Mos Eisley film, perhaps a film about some of the cantina characters, or heck, even brand new characters who just happen to frequent the cantina. I did say that was the last film(s) I would talk about but there’s one more film that some are still talking about. Obi-Wan. It’s not going to happen. It got turned into a television series, so don’t worry. You can still shout ‘Hello there!’ when it airs.

So the next selection of films that could happen is some potential Solo sequels. I thought I would talk about this separately since if this does happen it turns it from an Anthology film into its own series. What makes this a bigger probability is due to most of the actors having an opening in their contracts to be brought back in future films. Although I enjoyed Solo, I’m not too enthralled by the prospect of sequels. I’d be fascinated to learn more about a selection of the returning characters, but making films that are centred around characters whose future we already know is a difficult undertaking and the more films made about them, the higher risk that it completely backfires on them. I’d rather that the potential films focus on the Qi’ra and Darth Maul story arcs they tease at the end of the film. Though, overall, I don’t think Lucasfilm are likely to make any more of these in the near future of films until they flesh out the High Republic era.

The showrunners of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, were scheduled to be making a film series which was sometimes stated as a trilogy and sometimes stated as a longer series. This is a messy one. On the one hand, D&D did a great job with most of the first seven seasons of their hit show but there were so many problems with the last season that it’s rumoured to have come down to their motivation that I actually do not want these two to make a series of Star Wars films. Maybe just the one and it might work but if they give up on one of the biggest shows in television history during the last season, what would they do in a potential final film in their series? On the other hand, the films they were preparing to make were rumoured to be films based in The Old Republic. This is the period of Star Wars history that a lot of fans, including me, are dying to have a film set within. I’m talking a lot in the past tense because, as you may have seen, the pair have left the project due to a contract they have now signed with Netflix — probably including the reaction to season eight of Game of Thrones. I hope Lucasfilm simply let others take up the reigns of an Old Republic film or allow others to start their own project in a similar vein. Maybe this gets transformed into something High Republic related but a successful Old Republic film with characters like Revan would be a big win for them.

Taika Waititi is a director that has been recently given a Star Wars film that he is directing, and co-writing with Krysty Wilson-Cairns who wrote the screenplay for last year’s 1917. In recent years I have fallen in love with Waititi’s work and with his recent results in the last episode of The Mandalorian, I am confident that he could handle the atmosphere and tone for a Star Wars film whilst having fantastic characters like in all his other projects. Waititi, I think, would be most suited to stories set more in the Outer Rim. Not that he couldn’t do a story heavily involving Jedi or the Core Worlds, but the idea of a rag-tag team having shootouts and a fun adventure in Outer Rim planets fits Waititi to a tee.

A couple of other people linked with potential Star Wars films are one produced by Kevin Feige and another directed by J. D. Dillard and written by Matt Owens. I’m mentioning these two projects together because we don’t know anything really about the two projects and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions on these two potential projects apart from I like Luke Cage which Matt Owens worked on.

As we now move into television, the obvious one to start talking about is the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. As I mentioned earlier, it started off as a film before being turned into a series. The director for the whole show is going to be Deborah Chow who has already directed a couple of Star Wars television episodes of The Mandalorian, so there’s no concerns there whatsoever. With both Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen both on board, the series looks very promising. I hope it takes the route of focusing on Obi’s desert hermit period whilst utilising flashbacks to add more context to both Obi’s relationship with Anakin and his time between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

Russian doll co-creator Leslye Headland is someone else who is going to run a show with a female lead. All I can say about this is it’s a great starting point. I’d like it if shows weren’t planned with a forced gender on the main character but we don’t necessarily know that and Russian Doll was such a great show that I’m confident that Headland can most certainly do a great job. This show could go anywhere, the only other information given being that it will take place in a different part of the timeline. This could be another project that ends up part of the High Republic lot or potentially even something that takes place after the Sequel Trilogy. We’ll have to see.

Then we move on to something that I am a lot less excited about and that’s the Cassian Andor series. Again, similar to the points I made when talking about the potential Solo sequels or the Jabba/Mos Eisley films, I worry that it will both have a lot less impact because we know Cassian isn’t going to grow past where he is at the start of Rogue One and not as interesting as seen a Rebel Alliance spy series with all brand new characters or ones we don’t know a lot about. This is probably the series/film that I am least excited about and I’m not sure if it’s really going to have that much impact compared to what it could be without Cassian.

Then comes something that’s half a rumour and half my imagination and that’s the stuff with Ahsoka and Sabine at the end of Rebels. The ending of the animated television show left open the opportunity to do a variety of shows or films. Ahsoka and Sabine could have a project on them searching for Ezra leading to Thrawn being the primary villain again, or potentially they could appear in another project like The Mandalorian like they are rumoured to. There’s also the possibility that the rumoured Rebels follow-up series could take on some of these story points, or might just focus on the Ezra and Thrawn outcome separately.

Overall, there’s some potentially great stuff amongst the mix of announcements and rumours. The most interesting ideas out of these would be the Taika Waititi film, the Leslye Headland series and anything that ends up being themed around The Old Republic. We’ll just have to wait and see if they give us:

Hope.

-Boad