Rian Johnson Confirms He’s Already Started Working on His ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy
The Last Jedi hit theaters a whole three months ago, but the dust hasn’t entirely settled on the Star Wars film. We’re still gobbling up new behind-the-scenes tidbits, like the reason for Luke’s costume change at the start of the film and the glorious fun fact that Laura Dern said “pew pew” every time she shot her blaster. The Blu-ray doesn’t even hit shelves until next week, but Rian Johnson is already looking to the future for his Star Wars trilogy.
While stopping by the Empire Awards over the weekend, Johnson and producer Ram Bergman revealed that they have already begun work on their upcoming trilogy. “We’ve started, slowly, slowly, but we’ve started,” Bergman confirmed to Empire magazine (h/t Comicbook.com). Johnson reiterated as much, but said they still have to “figure out what it’s going to be.”
Details are near non-existent on Johnson’s new trilogy, of course, but we do know it will be separate from the Skywalker saga. Johnson’s said the films will introduce new characters, new locations, and new stories we’ve yet to see before. Last year, he revealed that his original pitch to Lucasfilm about the trilogy generated out of his desire to keep working with the studio and Kathleen Kennedy, and that pitch didn't even involved a narrative:
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.
It's pretty major, and unheard of, for a studio to hand over a full trilogy of one of the biggest properties in Hollywood to a guy without a story in place, but that goes to show how much faith Lucasfilm has in Johnson. (And after seeing The Last Jedi, it’s not hard to understand why.) He may still be figuring out exactly what those movies will be about, but hopefully some more concrete details arrive soon. Before the trilogy arrives, we’ll have Solo: A Star Wars Story on May 25 and Episode IX on December 20, 2019 to hold us over. Oh, and that Star Wars TV show.
Gallery – A Visual History of Star Wars Movie Posters: