There wasn’t time to get studio notes that end up sometimes taking you in lateral positions and making you adjust things—death by a thousand cuts—to a place where something doesn’t resemble what it should be, and you can’t remember why you got there or how. So the good news was I was jumping in with a writer whom I admired enormously; with Kathy and Callum Greene, a producer whom I’d never met; Michelle Rejwan, who had been my assistant, and whom Kathy had hired to work with her as a producer. But it was a completely unknown scenario. I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone. But without getting in the weeds on episode eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Episode VIII . So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies. While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII , the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge.
Star Wars IX panel (and trailer and title, I assume?) at Celebration today. 9 AM PT. I assume it’ll be streaming on the official YouTube channel.
Wish I didn’t have a bunch of meetings this morning. Damn work intruding on my nerdism.
Man, that’s a lot of words to say The Last Jedi was fucking stupid.
I’m not encouraged that JJ’s IX cowriter worked on Batman Vs Superman and Justice League.
I don’t want to be the person being all negative, but at this point Star Wars is a dead franchise to me. It’s super sad, but Disney doesn’t know what to do with it and doesn’t understand what made people love it in the first place.
How do you recover from The Last Jedi except to just retcon a bunch of shit in it. That works for comic books, not for movies. We get 3 movies in 10 years and they’re just going to ask us to pretend the middle one didn’t happen?
I don’t want to be this person either, but respectfully, give it a rest.
We’ve got plenty of Star Wars threads already taken over with arguing back and forth over the state of the franchise and our personal feelings on it. Some of us still love it, some of us now hate what it’s become, and no one’s convincing anyone of anything. All we can really agree on is that Episode VIII was clearly divisive.
So let’s all as a forum try a little harder to not take the bumping of any Star Wars thread as an invitation to launch into those debates again.
We’re probably minutes away from a trailer and the title reveal for Episode IX. By all means, argue about those! Nobody has to agree on anything. As we have new things to talk about, of course we should talk about them, and of course we’ll disagree. And certainly that involves discussing what came before, I’m not suggesting we never speak of Episode VIII again, or midichlorians, or Jar-Jar, or whatever.
But just saying the words “Star Wars” doesn’t need to be seen as a request to everyone to again launch into their personal grievances. If Star Wars is dead to you, maybe just let some conversations go on without a reminder.
Sorry @Wallapuctus, I’m responding to you because you just happened to be the latest, but it feels impossible to discuss any aspect of Star Wars on this forum without the disappointed fans showing up to tell you again that it’s all ruined for them and why.
Deal brudda
Plus the stuff that Pablo Hidalgo and Dave Filloni are doing is as good as Star Wars has ever been.
I don’t think it’s a debate. I only posted what I posted because someone else said it, in this case J.J. Abrams, which I think is fascinating.
He literally used a lot of words to say “Episode VIII was stupid.” I think it is newsworthy and interesting when the person directing the next movie disparaged the previous movie. (And he did. Yes he used corporate soft speech to do it, but he was pretty clearly saying that Episode VIII was stupid.)
I have to admit, I’m a bit worried, but the other way. I don’t want any kind of Star Wars argument since they get so heated, but since Last Jedi is my favorite Star Wars movie, the idea that they might need to retcon any of it is slightly upsetting. I finally become a true Star Wars FAN thanks to this movie, and now they might try to get around some of the consequences from that movie? I hope they handle it gracefully.
What you posted was fine. And it is interesting.
All that said I have some… let’s say reservations… about JJ’s story credentials. TFA threaded a nearly impossible needle nearly as well as could be. But Abrams is not, shall we say, known for narrative payoff or considered planning. And his writing staff isn’t my top picks either.
So while Abrams does come down on narrative choices, I’m also a big detractor of his ‘mystery box’ approach and so don’t give a flying fig about where he wanted to go and how TLJ changed that. But it is worth talking about what Abrams said regarding where it may go from here.
Its nice that Kelly Marie Tran got a standing ovation during the panel. She deserves some fan love after what the trolls did to her.
“The Rise of Skywalker”
Oh, and that Mac and Me looking alien on the leaked merchandise poster is a real thing in the movie.
Was that Ian Mcdiarmid that came out after the trailer?
He was attending.
As is Ahmed Best, Warwick Davis, a dozen voice actors from the animated series and more.
Also Ray Park, whom I’ve actually met before, when AotC released as I was working at a movie theater as a server, and they brought him in for the premier.
I got to have a mock plastic lightsaber fight with him, a few of us did.
I actually thought you were joking - holy crap, they’re not even trying anymore! Good to see Lando again, though.
I had an argument with a friend about VIII and Rey’s parents (or lack thereof). He assumed I was unhappy because they turned out to be nobody. But I don’t actually care about that, and corrected him (I simply wasn’t wild about having Abrams foreshadow things and then Johnson toss all of it out). What I told him in closing, though, was that I thought Abrams would reverse the decision Johnson made and restore Rey to having Parents of Some Significance™. Hardly a bold call; Abrams was making noises awhile ago but even outside of that it’s clear the new trilogy is experiencing some creative meandering.
Having now watched the trailer (it’s more of a teaser), and you know seen the name of the movie, I feel like maybe I will turn out to be right.
Betting on Abrams to make the obvious choice is rarely going to lose you money.