So now that The Force Awakens has been a real thing for five whole days, let’s turn our attention to hyping Episode VIII which is only two short years away. While J.J. Abrams will be staying on board as a producer of this new trilogy, he will be giving up the director’s chair to Rian Johnson. Apparently, Abrams now wishes he could take that back, because the script for the next movie is so good.
The word comes, not from Abrams himself, but the next best source, his longtime friend and collaborator Greg Grunberg. Grunberg has acted in nearly every project that Abrams has even been involved in, including playing X-wing pilot Snap Wexley in The Force Awakens. While he’s known the director since Kindergarten, Grunberg told The Washington Post that he’d never seen him react to a script the way he did to the one for the next part of the Star Wars saga.
He said: ‘It’s so good, I wish I were making it.’
That’s high praise, especially from the man who did just make a Star Wars movie, and from most accounts, made a pretty good one. The movie has broken nearly every box office record it’s possible to break on opening weekend, putting up summer movie numbers in the middle of December. After the work he’s put in, you would think he’s earned a bit of a rest. Instead, it looks like he’d keep working if he could direct the next episode. If Episode VII itself wasn’t enough to get you excited for the future of the Star Wars franchise, now we have word that the script is just that good. We of course have no information as to what makes it so great. Instead, we have two years of rumors ahead of us to try and figure that out.
J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson have been working together already, in order to make sure that the transition between Episode VII and Episode VIII is as seamless as possible. Johnson was aware of everything that would be going on in the new film so it could be worked into the next one. In addition, Johnson apparently had a couple things added to the recent movie in order to set up things he wanted to do in his.
With an entirely separate Star Wars movie planned between now and then, in Rogue One, it’s tough to get too excited about the next part of the Star Wars saga, but it is good to know that even the pros can get excited about what’s to come for the franchise's future.
