We're just one movie away from the completion of the current Star Wars trilogy, which means that the story of the Skywalkers is almost well and truly finished. After that, Rian Johnson will premiere a brand new trilogy with entirely new characters and settings that will hopefully satisfy longtime fans, while creating a generation of new ones. It's a tough challenge to be sure, but Johnson seems game to take it on. One of the biggest challenges for the writer-director is defining exactly what makes a Star Wars film so special.
Once you get past the things that are the iconography of Star Wars - once you say, okay, if it doesn't have the Falcon; if it doesn't have someone with Skywalker as their last name; if we don't go to Tatooine, what is it? What is it at its essence? It's a really exciting question, and I think it's something that has to be answered at some point. So let's figure it out.
Ahead of the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Lucasfilm announced that Rian Johnson would be creating an all-new trilogy of Star Wars films. This series will take place in an entirely different corner of the galaxy, one far away from the troubles of the Skywalker family. It's still incredibly early in the development of these movies, and Rian Johnson is only "just at the very beginning" of figuring what exactly they are going to be, but the possibilities are quite literally endless. It's enough of a challenge to make a regular Star Wars movie (see: Rogue One), but how do you make a new entry in the franchise bereft of the recognizable elements that make that series iconic? That's what Johnson has to figure out.
While speaking to IGN, Rian Johnson addressed the challenge of making a Star Wars film without any Skywalkers or the Millennium Falcon. It's an extremely interesting concept and one that Johnson seems excited to figure out. The director said that he was trying to find the core element of Star Wars, the part that made him excited as a kid watching the movie for the first time. It's certainly not a task that I'm envious of but I'm interested to see what Johnson comes up with.
At the moment, every Star Wars film has had something to do with the main series. Even the standalone films, which test the waters of independent stories, are connected to events or characters from the "Skywalker Saga" in some way. Rian Johnson will be breaking ground on his new series, and whether or not he directs and writes the whole thing, we'll be paying close attention.
You can get your yearly dose of Star Wars with the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, in theaters on May 25, 2018.
