Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/06/star-wars-episode-ix-director.html
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Colin has been a wonderful collaborator throughout the development process, but we have all come to the conclusion that he has a vision for the project.
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Translation from Hollywood-speak: the studio fired him.
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Kennedy, who had already been through one director firing/replacement on the Han Solo spinoff movie, was not eager for a sequel and tried to avoid this decision.
I had to reread that sentence to parse it correctly, as my train of thought got derailed by the idea of a Hollywood Producer not wanting to make a sequel.
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I assume he’ll be applying it to a Jurassic World squeaquel instead.
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All reports have indicated how well Rian Johnson’s been doing on Episode VII. I don’t think many fans were too excited to see Colin Trevorrow’s take on Star Wars, especially after his rather asinine comments on female directors and the very poor showing of Book of Henry.
There’s no shortage of excellent directors that could take over. Brad Bird is busy with Incredibles 2, but maybe Joe Johnson or James Gunn? Or heck, let’s get a Spielberg Star Wars movie. Rumor has it that JJ Abrams is stumping for Ava DuVernay, which I am all for.
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Isn’t it the same language used for sports teams and politicians?
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Never heard of him, but he can’t be worse than Lucas.
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For the love of all things…just push off the production and launch to let Bird finish with I2 so he can do SWIX. PLEASE!!!
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Maybe they could get Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich and we’ll see about that.
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He directed Jurassic World, which was… serviceable.
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The problem is they keep looking at these young, fresh directors with big, new ideas, and they don’t want that. They want something safe and formulaic. Which all of them other than the first two (Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back) have been in the past. More or less.
#1 - please just get a capable story with decent characters. You don’t need Oscar winning performances here, but the reasons the prequels sucked was because the stories were mostly awful and most of the characters created no connection with the audience.
#2 - I am OK with safe and formulaic if #1 is headed. Lucas DID think out of the box for the original Star Wars, creating something that was very new for the time (though it seems a bit formulaic now, because it WAS a mash up of past formulas, and has since been redone over and over). Same with Kershwin on Empire. I sort of expect them to copy the beats of Empire again and end on a down down for 8. But I hope they try to do it in a new way.
#3 - And so that leads us to the present. Now granted the prequels would have BENEFITED from some executive producers working together to steer things to the correct tone, pace, and coherence. But I sort of worry there is too much meddling now. They are wanting more or less production work from directors. A specific, brand guided look, feel, and tone to the films. Which really, isn’t a bad thing per se. But it does mean that the audience is less likely to be surprised with something new.
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They should just go for broke and hire Quentin Tarantino.
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They got a lot of low-key flack for Episode VI being too formulaic and playing it too safe, so I think they’re hoping for a young, fresh director willing to play within their box but who can also bring some energy and freshness to things. From everything folks have said, it sounds like they found exactly that with both Rian Johnson and Gareth Edwards, but then there’s folks like Lord & Miller who apparently jettisoned the working script of the Han Solo movie & had everyone just improv’ing, which was too out-of-the-box for Lucasfilm, who understandably get a bit nervous about these billion-dollar movies. They’d rather err on the side of safe brand control versus going off the rails.
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Getting rid of the Cro-Magnon is exactly how I perceived this scenario, even before reaching your response in the comment section.
Getting up to speed with feminism is how I’d like to imagine why this happened, but my more cynical side thinks it has more to to with box-office receipts, after the recent successes of Wonder Woman and Girls Trip (vs. Girls Night Out).
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Yeah, improving is good for a few throw away scenes, but unless you are Christopher Guest, I wouldn’t make it the whole move. It didn’t work out so well with the new Ghostbusters.
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I think you’re probably right, but I think the situation is over-constrained, if not inherently contradictory. Boxes and freshness tend to be anathema to one another.
That should work for an audience into alien feet.
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As a sidenote, just saw this interview with Rian Johnson about Ep VIII; he seems pretty thrilled with how much creative freedom and leeway they gave him, surprisingly – they seemed to really trust him. "I wasn’t given an outline of where it goes or even a list of things to hit. It really was just, ‘Okay, what’s next?”
I haven’t really followed the franchise as of late: was VII made with the same Disney Overlord as the current batch of movies? If so, then that’s at least a little encouraging.
