All they have to do to win over the fanboys is have the main characters come across a holocron of the horribl(y funny) death of Jar Jar Binks. Preferably involving at the very least several sharp, pointy objects and a blast furnace.
Written by an excellent writer, though. And I really think JJ Abrams did well on MI:3 and Star Trek. Star Trek Into Darkness, though…less so. Super 8 was OK.
I believe that plan is for every other year.
Wait! Is Jar-Jar going to die at the beginning of the movie?
- makes not to go see it after all *
I think it is every 3 years like the others, but that they will be releasing other Star Wars movies on some of the off years.
New trilogy released every other year: 2015, 2017, 2019
Non-trilogy one-offs in between, 2016, 2018, 2020. Rumour says one will be a Boba Fett movie, another a young Han Solo movie, though I believe the planned Yoda movie has already been taken off the table.
Or something. To be honest there’s so much rumour and misinformation mixed in with the confirmed facts that it’s hard to figure out what’s what.
Why would anyone want to see a Boba Fett movie? I mean, we’ve already seen his greatest accomplishment, managing to rocket himself into the maw of a thousand-year digestive system. Dude never did anything worthwhile.
He sold a fuckload of action figures.
The “Expanded Universe” explanation for Jar Jar’s fate is that he was frozen in Carbonite by a sadistic Empire governor.
I’d forgotten about Super 8. I liked that movie a lot. It was a passable sci-fi flick on its own merits, but I was impressed by how perfectly Abrams captured the feel of a mid-80s Spielberg movie. If he can capture the tone md-70s Lucas in the same way, this could be a very interesting movie.
But I’m more concerned it’ll end up like Star Trek, or Lost. One of the things that have made Star Wars and Star Trek such enduring properties is the sense of world-building that went into them. Not all of it was intentional, particularly in the case of Trek, but the end result was a universe that felt like it extended beyond the borders of the frame. And Abrams is absolutely shit at doing that.
Just as an example, off the top of my head, is the scene in Star Trek where Kirk meets up with Scotty. Abrams needed to get both of them back on the Enterprise for plot reasons. So, it turns out that Scotty had invented a new way of using a transporter that makes it work at interstellar distances, so he can use it to drop him and Kirk right on to the Enterprise, which is some multiple of “a billion miles away.” Great, except that Scotty has just rendered the spaceship obsolete, thus destroying the central premise of the franchise. Sure, it looked cool, and I still enjoyed the movie overall, but that sort of attention to detail is what separates a good sci-fi flick from a mediocre one.
Same thing with Lost, where Abrams had all these neat individual ideas, and no ability (or apparent interest) in sythesizing them into a coherent whole.
That said, Abrams’ stuff is always watchable, even if it doesn’t hold up to any kind of analysis, which is more than you can say for The Phantom Menace.
On the other hand, Disney has a fairly strong track record when using its media properties well. They usually seem to have a good balance of reigning in directors but giving them enough of a lead to do something good. Granted, the results aren’t always great (witness John Carter of Mars, etc.) But they seem to have more hits than misses.
Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” touched on this a bit in citing the entertainment industry as a major American industry and that despite miscalculations (like John Carter) the industry as a whole thrives with minimal government interference.
Michael Arndt is no longer scripting Episode VII.
I’m not sure what to think about this development. I’m not even sure we should be thinking anything, it’s very common for new passes on a script from the Director. But it does seem a little late in the process for it, I thought shooting was imminent.
I liked Robot Chicken’s take on it. Darth Vader spaces him out an airlock.
I just hope the new movie comes out on time so I can quit reading and hearing about how those last 3 were the worst 3 movies of all time.
Of course it’s possible this new one might be the 4th worst movie of all time. 
Here is what will happen when SW 7 comes out:
If it’s bad, it will be blamed on Lucas (somehow).
If it’s good, people will bring up how Lucas ruined the last 3 and how smart it was to use somebody else as director this time.
Eh, there are plenty of people that already dislike Abrams. I suspect he’ll get most of the hate if Ep VII sucks.
what would really be funny is if they bring back Jar Jar Binks. Just to see all the purists have a fit . But I don’t think there is much chance of him coming back.