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Disney Announces "One Star Wars Movie Per Year" Plan

mvar writes "Various sources report that a few days ago at CinemaCon Disney announced their plan to release, following the 2015 JJ Abrams Episode VII, a new Star Wars movie every 1 (one, uno, une) year. Yep, get your stomachs ready, because that's a lot of Jar Jar Binks."

17 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Are they Sequels? by djlemma · · Score: 4, Funny

    Are they planning to continue the story after the events of "Return of the Jedi?" If that's the case, hopefully we can safely assume that Jar Jar will remain in the past.

    1. Re:Are they Sequels? by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Funny

      ...they'll make it overly kid-friendly...

      Oh no! Huey, Dewey, and Louie Binks! Mesa gettin' very very scared!

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. Re:Are they Sequels? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I do, in general, have more faith in Disney than in George Lucas for coming up with a quality film.

      This, ladies and gentleman, is a classic example of 'damning with faint praise'.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    3. Re: Are they Sequels? by AudioEfex · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You mean like they did with Marvel?

      (In case it wasn't obvious, that was delivered with a great big /eyeroll)

      The comments from people who automatically assume that just because its Disney it's going t somehow be aimed at toddlers hasn't been paying attention the last twenty years or so. Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction? Released under branches of Disney.

      Stop thinking about Davy Crocket or Mary Poppins - Disney doesn't make live action like that any more. They went after a real director for Episode VII, they have old school Star Wars folk like Larry Kasdan working on the solo films, and again - seen any of the Marvel pictures?

      The problem with the prequels wasn't the kiddificaton - that's always been in Star Wars (the droids, the Ewoks, Chewbacca to a certain extent). It was because Lucas cannot write dialogue or direct actors worth a damn and he took too much on for those films. Most casual folk don't realize that he did it direct either of the original sequels. He is brilliant, just it at those things (and even Carrie Fisher's help ghost writing couldn't save the Padme storyline, George has such a fundamental misunderstanding of women it cannot help but show).

      I was never more happy than when Disney bought Star Wars - the Disney of today is much different tha the Disney we (or our parents) grew up with, and all this immature "OMGZ ITZ DISNEY!" knee-jerk garbage here and elsewhere just shows a fundamental lack of knowledge of the film industry over the past couple of decades, where Disney has realized that they have the best success when they outsource for talent and bring in the best people to do the job and trust them to do it right.

      Personally I cannot wait for Abrams to have his stamp on the franchise, and the future directors who will have an insane amount of resources to make hopefully great Star Wars films. Disney is just signing the checks here and making sure it doesn't turn into porn - other than that, I think you will find this isn't Walt's Disney any more.

    4. Re:Are they Sequels? by rmdingler · · Score: 5, Funny

      I find your lack of faith disturbing.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    5. Re:Are they Sequels? by cyberchondriac · · Score: 4, Funny
      --

      Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
    6. Re:Are they Sequels? by Culture20 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Does anyone need to see the Anakin movies (Ep 1-3) to understand the Luke movies (Ep 4-6)?

      Quite the reverse really. There are several points of emotional significance in 1-3 which are utterly meaningless if not confusing without having first seen 3-6.

  2. Maybe they shoot together and then split it up by eksith · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A bit like the LOTR series, maybe they're actually planning to continuously shoot one movie that then gets sliced to comfortable (relatively speaking) run times.

    --
    If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
  3. H.L. Mencken by selectspec · · Score: 4, Insightful

    “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

    “Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

    --

    Someone you trust is one of us.

  4. Lead Time by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One movie a year isn't that much when you've got a three-year lead-time. It's not necessary to complete each movie individually in a year
    2013: Script treatment
    2014: Shooting #1, Script treatment #2
    2015: Post-production and release #1, Shooting #2, Script treatment #3
    2016: Post-production and release #2, Shooting #3, Script treatment #4
    And so on. The trick would be hanging on to your actors; you'd probably need to rotate through different producers/directors too.

    As Tim of Ctrl-Alt-Del said, they've been pumping out Marvel-universe movies faster than that, and most of them have been pretty darn good. If they mine the better expanded universe fiction, there's no reason to expect they couldn't produce decent movies at a one-per-year rate.

    --
    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
  5. Hopefully... by Phrogman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The first scene, in the first movie, is a slo-mo shot of Jar-Jar Binks getting his head sliced off with a lightsaber. That might go a ways towards regaining the audience that Lucas has managed to piss off so heavily with eps 1-3. Casually mention a disease that wiped out all the Gungans and Ewoks...

    I doubt it though, I imagine Disney will continue the Lucas development cycle:
    1) Think of products that can be marketed easily to kids
    2) Come up with some script that links those products together in some manner. Regular rules for storytelling, or logic need not apply. Hire any actors who will sign, giving the main roll to the worst actor you get.
    3) Sell as much merchandise as possible, use some of the profits to make the next movie, starting over at 1.

    I sincerely hope I am wrong mind you and that Disney hires someone who *gets* what was attractive about most of Eps 4-6 and makes films in keeping with those at least, but I doubt it will turn out that way.

    --
    "The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
    1. Re:Hopefully... by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Funny

      The first scene, in the first movie, is a slo-mo shot of Jar-Jar Binks getting his head sliced off with a lightsaber.

      Unfortunately, the second scene has the camera view swooping through the door marked "sekrit cloning lab" into a room filled with tens of thousands of mechanical pods. Lids on the pods slide open in unison, as the camera zooms in to the blank soulless gaze of a Jar-Jar clone. Scrolling title text rolls from the bottom of the screen, receding to a vanishing point:

      STAR
      WARS
      EPISODE VII
      Rise of the Jar-Jarmy

  6. What a coincidence by paiute · · Score: 4, Funny

    "...Disney announced their plan to release, following the 2015 JJ Abrams Episode VII, a new Star Wars movie every 1 (one, uno, une) year. "

    That's funny. I have a plan to not watch a new Star Wars movie every year.

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    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  7. Re:More?? by paiute · · Score: 5, Informative

    the best Sci-Fi story ever made!

    For some extremely loose definition of science fiction. Star Wars had fiction but no science. It is sword and sorcery in space.

    --
    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  8. Close Shave by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

    You had me at Jar-Jarmy.

    Considering that was the last word of his post I'd say that was a close thing.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  9. yes, it was not star trek by bussdriver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Abrams didn't like Star Trek, he never got it and even said so - he liked Star Wars. He managed to even blow up a whole planet with a super large ship and I was waiting for some kind of "Kirk, I'm your father" moment... He'd have used light sabers in his sword fighting scene except that wouldn't have gotten permission from Lucas.

    The movie was not Star Trek and despite being a Trek fan, I was not suckered into the typical remake formula that even the most poorly made movies use today. Cameos and geeky back references don't fool me. I guess I'm not much of a Trekkie because I'm not so emotionally desperate that I shutdown my brain at a Spock cameo. Hell, Disney could put Spock into the next Star Wars movie and bill it as both a Trek film and Star Wars film and I bet people would buy it! Sheep.

    There are actual recorded interviews with Gene Roddenberry about how Trek was never "dark" and "edgy" and that completely missed the point of it; he had to fight to keep it away from people trying to drag it into that direction. It had the 60's moon landing optimism about the future and how we could aspire to evolve beyond such things; he primarily used aliens to illustrate those things. Today's modern anti-heroes have no place in the world he created. Like religion, the qualities that bring people in are often forgotten and the dogma takes over; having the superficial Trek branding doesn't define what is Star Trek. I wonder why anybody bothers to study or think at deeper levels on literature, because apparently not even the authors do; anymore. I dare not imagine how Candide, ou l'Optimisme would turn out as a movie.

    Yes, the last Trek movies sucked because they don't care once they make money and know they can sucker people back for a few sequels - then they bring in somebody to try something drastic so they can continue to beat a dead horse... as if the "franchise" was worn out when in fact it is 100% the studio's fault every time. They make their money because people will settle for back references with a bland thoughtless dream-like state of mind (which is why huge plot holes are commonplace; once you suspend all reasoning... see the "How it should have ended" series) All this stuff is making people more stupid while wasting their time. Entertainment doesn't have to lower your IQ.

  10. Milking It to Death by sanman2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The physics of Hollywood is such that it will eventually suck everything dry, like locusts ravaging the landscape until it's so barren that they starve to death. Any good stories that they have produced will ultimately be repeatedly milked to death until they are bone dry.