A fourth Star Wars trilogy is on the way, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
Late last night, the Powers That Be over at Lucasfilm officially announced that Rian Johnson, writer and director on The Last Jedi, will spearhead a brand new trilogy replete with original characters and a whole new storyline – one that will also take place in some unexplored corner of a galaxy far, far away.
Details are still few and far between – no release dates, no story clues – but Johnson’s new chapter will presumably launch at some point in the 2020s, long after J.J. Abrams and his team have brought the curtain down on Lucasfilm’s time-honored saga with Star Wars: Episode IX.
And at the risk of stating the obvious, last night’s announcement can be construed as a ringing endorsement of Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi, as Kathleen Kennedy noted in the official statement:
Watching him [Johnson] craft The Last Jedi from start to finish was one of the great joys of my career. Rian will do amazing things with the blank canvas of this new trilogy.
And this really is a blank canvas. Set to work in close collaboration with Ram Bergman (Looper, Brick), Johnson’s new series will keep the Star Wars franchise in vogue for the next decade – if not longer – as it’s worth keeping in mind that Lucasfilm has floated ideas for anthology movies based on Boba Fett and Yoda.
If those projects take off, thereby joining Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story in the list of Star Wars anthologies, then each standalone pic will offer a nice tonic to Rian Johnson’s trilogy, given it’ll primarily focus on a raft of new characters.
Exactly how things pan out will be told in time, but what we do know is that Rian Johnson’s first port of call will be to launch Star Wars: The Last Jedi into theaters on December 15th. And early signs suggest that he’s knocked it out of the park and into hyperspace.
