There’s no doubt that the Star Wars movies are some of the most influential and cinema-changing works to grace the silver screen. But they’ve all focused on one thing – the Skywalker family.
The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson – who is helming his own Star Wars trilogy – is aware of this, and plans to go beyond the troubled Skywalker family with his next films.
New Characters
The 45-year-old filmmaker enthused about his upcoming contributions to the SW universe in an interview with Observer.com:
I think that the fun and challenging part of it is to dive in, figure out what’s exciting and then figure out what it’s going to be. We’re doing something that steps beyond the legacy characters. What does that look like? To me, the blue sky element of it is what was most striking about it. I know the way that I’m coming at it and what’s fun about it for everyone in Lucasfilm is figuring out, ‘what’s the next step?’ It really makes you think and figure out what the essence of Star Wars is for me and what that will look like moving forward.
The idea of the story stretching beyond the universe’s most dysfunctional family will no doubt excite ardent Force-lovers. After all, the Star Wars Legends novels (formerly the Expanded Universe before the recent movies jettisoned them out of canon) did this many years before. Even the likes of Wedge Antilles, the popular Rogue Squadron pilot who survived the original movies, was fleshed out and given greater backstory in said books.
While it’s currently unknown whether Johnson will draw inspiration from the Legends books, it’ll be interesting to see the focus on some new characters.
Johnson said he will start work on his spin-off trilogy after his 2019 neo-noir mystery Knives Out. Kathleen Kennedy claims that he is working closely alongside Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss.
Are you looking forward to Johnson’s Star Wars trilogy? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
