Kathleen Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm, has revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the next Star Wars Anthology movie will be decided very soon. In fact, we could learn what it is as early as next month, if she’s to be believed.
“We haven’t identified it yet, but yes. We have a couple of things right now that we’re circling, and we’ll make a decision between the two pretty shortly. It’s probably for 2020, and we will make a decision by June.”
The film will follow in the footsteps of Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One and Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s still untitled Han Solo spinoff. These Anthology movies were, at one point, regarded with a certain amount of scepticism, with the worst case scenario that they’d be a forgettable cash-in between ‘proper’ episodes in the franchise.
Rogue One pretty much put that to bed, however, providing a riveting look into what was going on immediately prior to A New Hope. I, for one, thought it was better than The Force Awakens. While it’s way too early to make a judgment call on Han Solo, the cast is amazing and the directors are undeniably talented. So, expectations are understandably high for whatever will follow from them.
The obvious question is, what will that be? Here, the rumour mill has gone into full speed, with everything from a solo Yoda movie, to a Boba Fett film all the way to having Ewan McGregor reprise his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi for an outing set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope popping up.
If I had to choose, I’d pick the latter. McGregor’s Obi-Wan was far and away one of the best things about the justly maligned prequel trilogy and I think he deserves a script and movie that finally does the performance justice. I guess the question is whether Disney are prepared to acknowledge the prequels rather than sweep them under the rug, as they appear to be doing right now.
Then again, like Rogue One, they could invent a whole new crew and show us some new corner of the Star Wars universe that no one’s even imagined yet. Really, the possibilities are endless given just how many characters there are in the franchise and how much of this world hasn’t been explored on the big screen yet.
Given the quality of the last two Star Wars films and how great The Last Jedi looks, we have no doubt that Lucasfilm will make the right decision and we can’t wait to find out what they’ve settled on for the next Star Wars Anthology movie, which will reportedly be with us in 2020.