Why You May Never See the Obi-Wan Kenobi Film
Liked “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story?”
You may not get more movies like it.
Disney is putting a hold on further “Star Wars” anthology films, insiders told Collider. So far, those have been “Rogue One” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”
Instead, Disney is honing in on the sequel to the polarizing “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the trilogy that “Last Jedi” Director Rian Johnson has been hired to direct and at least five other films.
Fans were looking forward to planned Obi-Wan Kenobi and Boba Fett films, but folks developing it are out of the picture, sources said.
Disney has already officially announced the “Last Jedi” sequel and the Johnson trilogy, which will have new characters. They also will be making a new saga by “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. None of these are the standalone films that are on hold.
And, Disney is zeroing in on a trilogy that will follow the “Last Jedi” sequel---yes, it will be part of the ongoing film saga that started in 1977 with “Star Wars: A New Hope,” Newsweek reported.
Last month, “Solo” performed relatively poorly at the box office. It made $84.4 million on opening weekend and grossed $192.8 million domestically. “Rogue One” made $155 and $424 million, respectively, according to Collider.
When “Solo” was released may have influenced its box office receipts. “Solo” faced off against the biggest film of the summer season in “Avengers: Infinity War,” which was expected to do better than the Ron Howard film. It also competed with “Deadpool 2,” the sequel to a record-setting film that has broken records itself. (Some wrote that because of the box office success of “Infinity War” and “Black Panther,” results for “Solo” are “irrelevant.”)
Could “Solo” have done better with not-as-fierce competition in December?
Plans for the Fett film have been changed twice now. The first time, Josh Trank (“Chronicle”) was developing such a movie in the same vicinity of time that Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla”) was preparing “Rogue One,” but Trank was taken off the project, Collider reported.
And even the standalones that have been seen in theaters suggest that there was a war of its own behind the scenes. The third act of “Rogue One” was reworked due to reshoots. Edwards was sidelined, with Tony Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) addressing reported story issues. Phil Lord and Chris Miller initially directed “Solo” but were fired in the middle of the making of the film. Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Disney subdivision Lucasfilm, brought in Ron Howard as their replacement, Collider reported.
As it goes in the filmmaking business, someone could put an idea for a standalone film that could change Disney’s continually changing plans with “Star Wars,” but the studio has apparently “moved away” from the anthology movies and is “squarely intent” on producing the “Last Jedi” sequel, Collider’s Steve Weintraub wrote.
© 2018 Rhett Wilkinson