While we wait to find out who will direct Star Wars Episode VII and dig through a lot of rumors in the meantime, there are three men attached to the new Star Wars trilogy who everyone is open about: Michael Arndt, Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg. Arndt has been officially hired as the writer for Episode VII, while Kinberg and Kasdan are on board to write subsequent movies-- though, based on a new report, they're not exactly just writing the sequels.
According to THR, Kinberg and Kasdan are indeed on board as writers, but the scripts they'll develop won't necessarily be episodes VIII and IX. The scripts could turn into those sequels, or they could be used for spinoffs or some other kind of content set within the universe. Now that Disney owns Lucasfilm there are endless possibilities for other Star Wars stories, from TV shows on the Disney Channel to novels to straight-to-video releases to theme park rides. It's clearly one of the reasons that Disney paid the hefty $4 billion to acquire the company, and while it would be a little insane to hire high-profile writers like Kasdan and Kinberg to write anything other than a feature film, it's Star Wars; they can do pretty much whatever they want.
As much as we all want to see another Kasdan-scripted Star Wars movie-- he wrote Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, after all-- it's actually good to hear that they're not barreling ahead with the scripts for all three movies simultaneously. Hopefully they'll leave time to see what works and what doesn't in Arndt's script and adjust from there, without having to stick to some pre-ordained mythology that could make it all feel as lifeless as the original prequels. Best case scenario: we get a Kasdan-scripted Star Wars, but a script written several years from now.
