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Might Episodes VII - IX Still Be Made?
LE UI Guy writes "According to the HoustonChronicle.com, with all the hype surrounding the recent release of ROTS, speculation abounds that someone may still take a stab at creating episodes VII - IX. Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, gives some insight into where the storyline may, or may not, go. On a related note, Roger Ebert, is also giving a thumbs up to a continuation of the storyline as well. Where does the line start?"
WTF?
There's way too much money to be made to just not continue the series with so much hype still alive.
If there's a VII, VII and IX, you just know there's going to be X, XI, and XII after that.
Then it's the prequel to the prequel. Negative I, II and III. I don't know, maybe Darth Vader discovers time travel.
Unless you get Natalie Portman to be wearing that outfit Carrie Fisher wore in RotJ, I don't want to hear any more about it. Please.
Enough already.
It's been more than 25 years since the first three episodes came out. So much has changed then that if movies taking place after episode 6 were to to be made now episodes 4,5,and 6 would just be smack in the middle of a bunch of episodes made with cg and crummy love scenes. Episode III was welll worth the wait, but I think it's time to put the series to rest.
"Lucas you sonofabitch, you have shat upon my childhood."
Stage 2 - Attack of the Clones:
"I still hate him even though these movies are absolutely gorgeous. Last 15 minutes were ok."
Stave 3 - Revenge of the Sith:
"Wow that was cool seeing all those early Darth Vader moments and... wha? no more? Noooooooooooooo! Make more! MAKE MORE"
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
that in these sequels, the Ewoks will shoot first.
Join the TWIT army now!
My guess is it'll go "up". That's the only place it can go, from these last three travesties of writing/directing.
Note to filmmakers of the future: bad dialog leads to anger, bad directing leads to hatred, shallow action sequences lead to suffering. Farming out a movie to a corporation of computer animators is a path to the dark side of filmmaking.
Stooge 1 - Moe:
"You're holding the wrong end of your light saber, moron."
Stooge 2 - Larry:
"This isn't a light saber. Moron."
Stooge3 - Curly:
"Now THIS is using the force, Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk."
Stooge 3 1/2 - Shemp:
"I always knew they were gay."
Certainly, the plan all along was to have a 9-parter. He said so himself, shortly after the original Star Wars movie came out. (Those in the UK at the time might remember the interview with George Lucas that was broadcast on Ask Aspel, at about that time.)
He has said that others have done "plenty" in the post-ROJ era, but that could mean anything. He could mean that some published (or UNpublished) existing work by himself or someone else would form the basis for 7-9 - ie: nothing new has to be written, as it already is.
The fact that episode III grossed so much in the first day might cut either way. On the one hand, it proves Star Wars is still worth a LOT of money. On the other hand, it gives Mr Lucas a chance to bow out of Star Wars on the kind of high note that very very few directors ever get to have. Star Wars is worth a lot, but so is a good image, and right now Mr Lucas has one of the best images out there.
Probably the deciding factor will be the advancement of computer-generated graphics. George Lucas has clearly proven that he likes high-tech toys, with I-III, and even IV-VI had some impressive effects for the day and the budget. (IV was the shoestring of shoestrings, by all accounts, but still pulled off some pretty good special effects which stood the test of time.)
If, within the next few years, we see some really good rendering engines - cone-tracer + radiosity (or better) at speeds fast enough for live-action - then maybe Mr Lucas would do the last 3 parts just to play with the new gizmos. I could believe it.
On the other hand, if we see a stagnation, with no real improvements in quality but maybe just a bit more quantity, then the technology won't coax him out. That would be my bet. He's had his fun with what's out there, he'll want something that is NEW for the last 3, if he's to think it worth it on those grounds.
Of course, I'm probably completely wrong, but it's always fun to speculate about such things.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm pretty sure they were written by Timothy Zahn. Yes, I have the books sitting on my shelf behind me...
...those were made a long time ago.
Episode VII: The Ewok Adventure
Episode VIII: Ewoks: The Battle for Endor
Episode IX: Star Wars Holiday Special
Let's do X, XI, XII
then wait 10 years to do VII, VIII, IX
Hopefully, George Lucas will not destroy his own creation by cheapening it.
One of the principal problems with "Star Trek" is that there have been too many television shows and too many movies. After a while, the plots start to eerily repeat themselves. The novelty is gone, and "Star Trek" now just looks like another washed-up television show. If you saw last week's final episode of "Enterprise", you will understand what I mean.
Someone must slap some sense into George Lucas. He should immediately pull the plug on the new television shows. The rare gem (i.e. 6 movies with the "Star Wars" theme) is treasured. The commonplace grains (i.e. weekly episodes of "Star Wars") of sand is just banal crap. If Lucas wants to produce any more "Star Wars" film, then he should focus only on the movies.
"Right, you are. Young Slashdotter. A law, we need. At most 10 'Star Wars' movies per century, we should make!" Yoda concurs.
I guarantee you another trilogy will appear. If there is any money to be made Lucas will make it.
... then Lucas will start work on another series.
But the trilogy will not be announced for a while. First Lucas will have to make sure he sells all the movie tickets to Sith he can, then he must make sure he sells all the DVD disks he can. Then he will do a revision in the movies and issue YET ANOTHER DVD collection and sell all of that.
Then he will combine the original series with the prequels and sell that. Then he might do another revision. During that time there will also be a TV series.
And after everyone has gotten sick of the original trilogy and the prequels, and anyone with the remotest chance of buying the DVD set has bought it
Now start your spending!
Have you read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy of sequels?
If you got Zahn and a decent screenwriter to write the movie adaptations, and gave their work to a decent director, such as Irvin Kershner who did a good job at the helm of The Empire Strikes Back, then you'd have movie dynamite.
The Thrawn trilogy books have it all. Dynamite story, dynamite action, dynamite drama, dynamite twists - the lot. If anything, perhaps there's too much good material there for it to be trimmed down to three two-hour movies, so maybe they'd be better suited to a TV mini-series but to suggest that there isn't any film or TV potential left in the Star Wars is criminal.
Heck, even a bounty hunters film that used material from KW Jeter's Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy would be cool if handled with the appropriate care.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I disagree. Writing a good story and putting together good visual effects are what Lucas is great at. What he can't do is write decent dialogue, or direct properly. That's why Empire Strikes Back was so good. He didn't write the dialogue, or direct. The story, however, was his.
NNNNNNNNNNnooooooooooooooOoooooooooooOooooo *wave arms like a robotic monkey*
The thing is, TPM culd have been really good.
:)
We had a cool chase sequence at the beginning, a pod race, and a really cool battle at the end. Even the story wasn't too bad. It's just there are so many ways it could have been improved, that any fanboy could come up with.
Start with action rather than a rather dull background about Trade routes and blockades. ANH got this right. with two ships shooting at each other.
Make Anakin less annoying. Or make everyone else a bit irritated by him.
Introduce R2D2 and C3PO right at the start. Lucas created these characters but doesn't seem to remember why. They serve the traditional purpose of a narrator. If any exposition is needed, they're the ones to do it. Hence we have Luke explaining to Artoo that he's going to Dagobah, a Threpio saying "Imperial stormtroopers? Here?".
Jar Jar could at least have been made vaguely useful. How about if it turned out he was a competent general rather than a clown. The big land battle could have been cool rather than "funny". Ewoks were cute, funny and a bit stupid, but then they showed they were pretty handy in a battle against imperial stormtroopers.
So you see, Lucas should have just hired me as a script editor
contrary to jedi tradition of training padawans since early infancy so they could learn ro supress strong and negative emotions, luke was an adult when he started training, with all the emotional background you get in 20 years.
thanks to this, he can do a thing most of us is capable of, bu a jedi cant. use rage to increase your strenght then return to your senses instead of going insane.
the prophecy was right. anakin did bring balance to the force. he destroyed the dicotomy of "pure good" of the jedi and "pure evil" of the sith and laid the foundations of a new order that acts for good while still using strong emotions to drive the force.
What ? Me, worry ?
When Lucas first talked about making 9 episodes, he clearly stated that his vision was for three independent stories. He stated that the only characters that would be common between each set of three were to be the two droids. His original vision, based on his own statements, certainly was not to make a story about a young Obi-wan and Luke's dad and Yoda. The three episodes that got made were not his original stated vision at all. He blew away his original vision of three episodes that would stand alone in favor of making three espsodes that already had strongly eastablished marketing concepts behind them.
So yes, more episodes will be made. But the original vision for VII, VIII and IX will likely never been seen, any more than the original vision for I, II and III will ever been seen. They were destroyed by the dark force.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Well, I'm sorry I gave up again. I was never a fan of the original series. I did like TNG and some of DS9, but there was an undercurrent throughout them (particularly TNG) that really bothered me. An undercurrent that made Voyager the most interesting series for me.
Why? Because it's Voyager that really started looking into the Federation's dirty little secret.
There's this amazing (and at the beginning apparently accidental) "human rights" story thread in Voyager. And it's got nothing directly to do with Voyager's Voyage or (for the most part, with one major exception) with anything that happens outside its hull. It's what happened inside the Federations "dirty little secret" -- the ship's automation and the much maligned Holodeck.
The whole issue of the rights of AIs in Trek had really bothered me. All the way back in TNG it seemed clear to me that the Federation's treatment of Holodeck characters was deeply abusive: the creation of the self-aware "Moriarty" character was presented as a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, but the way the constraints on his persona were removed by a simple request to the Holodeck computer implies the potential for self-awareness was there all the time. The Redblock character in "The Big Goodbye" also seemed suspiciously self-aware. The disturbing possibility is that it's not that Data the author of the Dixon Hill holoprograms (was that Picard himself?) are such brilliant programmers that they managed to create AI software decades beyond the state of the art, but rather that all the computer persona in the Federation are potentially self-aware (in the same way that Data was) with deliberate limitations programmed in to suppress that self-awareness. Or, and this is more likely and more disturbing, that it was just the expression of that self-awareness that was expressed.
I'm not saying this was deliberate, and I'm sure it was unconscious, but whether it was deliberate or not the Star Trek series, starting with The Next Generation, presented a whole underclass of artificial people who were systematically suppressed... unless they happened to be implemented in a small enough computer that they could fit in a humanoid robot like Data and so present themselves as an actual person.
In Voyager the Doctor's growth was also treated as a one-time event, the result of him running continuously for so long that his software (database, neural nets, whatever) became exceptionally complex for a holodeck character. But when you put it on top of the previous series, it seems more likely that it was as much a matter of him bypassing the AI equivalent of the holodeck "safety protocols" that had been built into him, and that this kind of awakening must be happening over and over again back in the Federation. After all, people like Picard and Janeway (let alone holodeck addicts like Barkley) seemed to be in the habit of running extended ongoing simulations like the daVinci and Dixon Hill programs... and even in an episodic series like Dixon Hill where characters would typically be reset on a regular basis they were capable of showing self-awareness.
On top of this, the same computers were used for their ships and no doubt for their industrial plants. All these computers have AI personas as user interfaces and sophisticated problem solving abilities. They're not, (at least according to hints in DS9), as powerful as the ones used in the Holodecks, but all of them are getting more powerful and sophisticated over time. And these personas are not shut down and reset at the end of a "game".
So when Janeway gave the Hirogens holodeck technology to simulate prey, I saw that as the moral equivalent of handing over a coffle of slaves to abusive masters. Even if the characters who were dying in their WWII simulation weren't self aware (and I was already doubtful of that), would the Hirogens see self-awareness of these characters as a bug, or a feature?
So this was something that had been bothering me about the new Trek in general, an undercurrent that just wouldn't g