This has been an exciting week for Star Wars fans, with the announcement about the limited release of the Force Awakens trailer, and now the rumored plot to the 2016 Star Wars spinoff film by Gareth Edwards and Gary Whitta has hit the Web. This film will be the first of three Star Wars spin off films.
While the plot for Edwards and Whitta’s film isn’t officially confirmed, the rumored plot sounds incredibly exciting, and it seems to be a story worth spending an entire movie to tell. According to SlashFilm, the film will allegedly center around an intergalactic heist. More specifically, this movie will center around a group trying to steal the plans for the first Death Star. So while the story will be set in the same time period as A New Hope, it looks like we won’t be following actual members of the Rebel Alliance as they work to derail the plans for the Death Star. Instead, the heist will be carried out by a group of bounty hunters (no word if Boba Fett is one of the bounty hunters, fingers crossed). As SlashFilm says, think Seven Samurai or Suicide Squad meets Oceans Eleven in the Star Wars universe.
Focusing on this story for the first standalone film makes complete sense, as it is really what sets off the entire saga in the original trilogy. For such a pivotal deed, we know surprisingly little about the actual apprehension of the Death Star plans apart from the details given on the crawl of A New Hope, which doesn’t tell the audience much beyond explaining what the Death Star is, and the fact that the Rebel Alliance took the plans for it.
The last two rumors about the 2016 stand alone film? First, the Millennium Falcon is rumored to be involved in the film somehow, but Han Solo is not. Of course this could be another ship with a similar name, or the Falcon could be under either a thief or Lando Calrissian’s ownership. The second rumor is that Edwards and Whitta’s main character will be introduced in The Force Awakens. Of course, given the timeline of the two films, this character would have to be significantly older in The Force awakens if he or she is truly the protagonist of Edwards and Whitta’s movie. If we don’t meet this character until The Force Awakens, it could also explain why Disney and Lucasfilm are a bit hesitant to confirm or deny any of these rumors.
However, at this point these are nothing more than rumors. It will be exciting to see how the Star Wars universe develops as get closer to the premiere of The Force Awakens. While Edwards and Whitta’s film doesn’t yet have a specific release date, The Force Awakens will hit theaters on December 18, 2015.
