Shrew wrote:
Is the Daldry/Obi-wan thing anymore than rumor? Given that nothing of that has been announced yet, nothing has come up to replace whatever Josh Trank was working on, and the only news of new Star Wars is Johnson's trilogy, I wouldn't be surprised if Disney were stepping away or reconsidering the one-off films. Each project in "Star Wars Stories" has had its share of behind the scenes troubles, so perhaps they prefer the greater control and direction that trilogies might offer them. Or, as Ribs sort of gets at above, maybe Johnson's films take up the main/trilogy mantle, and then the new spin-off films focus on Finn/Rey/Poe/etc. rather than another trilogy centered on those characters (single films probably being easier to negotiate contracts for). I imagine this is McCrutchy's nightmare scenario.
And while I don't think Rouge One was a failure or disappointment to Disney at large, it does seem to have failed at the secondary task of building up an audience in the Chinese market. Despite Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen, Rouge One earned half the receipts of Force Awakens in China, and now Last Jedi has flat-out bombed there. That, more than any distancing from the original trilogy, is probably the biggest threat to the franchise's future/Disney's main concern. Indeed, it makes it more likely that Disney will pursue new avenues, characters, and settings, rather than lean on nostalgia for the original films (which is non-existent in China).
It wasn't a rumor - he
is in development on the film. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be made, but it's the only whisper we've heard of anything brewing on these other films in the past year or two so it's not unreasonable to assume it's the next one in line. The Boba Fett film was seemingly thrown out with Trank (and was probably intended to come out in Solo's place - thankfully Disney avoided such production headaches by getting rid of Trank before the film was seriously in the pre-production phase.) I don't necessarily see why Ewan McGregor would need to have committed to such a thing at this point, a solid 18 months out from the earliest they could start filming (he's a busy working actor, but he's got no other franchises short of his Christopher Robin reboot becoming a runaway success). He clearly would love to do it, I don't imagine it'll require much persuading on his part.
Ultimately, it's almost certain that when all's said and done Solo will comfortably have put Disney in the point where it's made its money back from acquiring Lucasfilm (if you were to go entirely off box office, it already has, but to factor in the billion they've spent making four blockbuster films it'll take one more film to push it over the margin). And so it really doesn't matter - Disney's successfully bolstered their library with the most valuable franchise on the planet and have gotten Indiana Jones for free on top of it. Anything from that point on is just adding to that.
I don't really think of an Obi-Wan film as theoretically being reliant on nostalgia for the original films! I guess it's possible that these "Star Wars Stories" (they're not really called that) are actually *all* direct prequels to
Star Wars and they'll each end with the characters the moment before we see them in the original film, which'd be an interesting path to take, but I'm hopeful that at least Solo won't take that path and leave things a little less pat (and I'd be more willing to believe an Obi-Wan film would just be an independent space adventure rather than, like, doing
the Searchers but with the Sand People). I think a part of Rogue One that was ignored is the way it really did lean into the recent revisionist take on the Prequels, that they were worthy and inspired (the latter I can kind of see), and Rogue One really worked to ingratiate the nostalgia for the original films to be inseparable with characters and actors we didn't really care about in the prequels. Again, it's just a savvy move that increases the worth of the prequels as part of the set, and an Obi-Wan film seems like a culmination of that idea. But I think the idea of having the main films be the *new* things and the other films be the old things would be a smart way of separating the two into distinct entities.
Oh, and also: there is a very high probability Episode IX outgrosses the Last Jedi, because people like turning up to see "the last one." Same happened to the last two third films.