A few days ago, Disney mysteriously set release dates for Star Wars films in 2022, 2024, and 2026. Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had been working on their own undisclosed Star Wars trilogy and so had The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, so it was really anyone’s guess which of these two trilogies had been slated for release.
Disney CEO Bob Iger has since confirmed that it is Benioff and Weiss’ trilogy, which will begin releasing after a three-year hiatus following this December’s release of The Rise of Skywalker. So, here are 10 Possibilities For Disney’s New Star Wars Trilogy.
Knights of the Old Republic
Just like Benioff and Weiss’ own show Game of Thrones is going deep into its own fictional history to expand the universe with the prequel spin-off The Long Night, some fans have speculated that their Star Wars trilogy might be set during the time of the Old Republic.
This was 4,000 years before the rise of the Galactic Empire, so the movies would have no obligatory ties to the other trilogies like the sequel trilogy has had. The Jedi and Sith were still around back then, and the period was extensively covered by Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made.
Obi-Wan’s adventures between Episode III and Episode IV
What made Rogue One a success and Solo a box office bomb was not down to “Star Wars fatigue” or some other buzz phrase. Moviegoers love the Star Wars universe and the escapism it provides, but if you’re going to fill in gaps, make sure they’re gaps that need to be filled in. Rogue One told us a key piece of story that was missing from the beginning of A New Hope, whereas Solo was more or less a feature film adaptation of an anecdote.
One thing fans are clamoring for is more of Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan. There’s a lot of time between his hiding in Tatooine at the age of Ewan McGregor at the end of Episode III and his call back into adventure at the age of Alec Guinness at the beginning of Episode IV. It’s just screaming to be made into a movie.
Jabba the Hutt’s rise and fall
As soon as Disney announced they would be making “Star Wars Anthology” spin-off movies, Guillermo del Toro came out with an idea for an epic trilogy about Jabba the Hutt’s rise and fall in the criminal underworld, a little like an intergalactic version of The Godfather or Scarface.
Del Toro has been stiffed on a cinematic trilogy before, having his initial vision for a two-part Hobbit movie taken from him and dragged out into a trilogy by New Line and Peter Jackson. So, maybe Lucasfilm has taken his pitch on board and given it to Benioff and Weiss to write. They haven’t been announced to be directing this trilogy – maybe the big announcement will be that del Toro is helming it from their scripts.
A bounty hunter being trained by Boba Fett
For a while now, Disney has been trying to develop a movie about Boba Fett set between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy, as he rises through the ranks of the bounty hunter game to become Darth Vader’s go-to guy as we see him The Empire Strikes Back.
But maybe a more interesting story would be a younger bounty hunter trained by an old, grizzled Boba Fett who has escaped from the Sarlacc and survived the events of Return of the Jedi. We’d see him take on an apprentice and train him like Dr. Schultz. It could be Django Unchained in space.
Young Yoda
We saw Yoda, possibly the wisest and most powerful Jedi who ever lived, for the last 50 or so years of his life. In the prequels, he was still super old, because they were only set a couple of decades before the original trilogy. But when he died in Return of the Jedi, he said he was 900 years old. That’s 850 years’ worth of untold stories. This guy was young at some point.
Even if it was hundreds of years ago, Benioff and Weiss could go to a point in the vast scope of Star Wars history and find a young Yoda in the middle of an ideological crisis. There’s every chance that, with the Skywalker saga coming to an end and Solo: A Star Wars Story failing at the box office, Disney is going double or nothing and combining the “Anthology” spin-offs with ongoing trilogies and seeing how a combination of their two release strategies works out.
The Unknown Regions
The galaxy of Star Wars is pretty detailed. There are reams of maps available and the canon has been fully fleshed out. However, “the Unknown Regions” remain, well, unknown to us. We know that Palpatine was obsessed with the Unknown Regions and believed them to possess some secret Dark Side power that we couldn’t imagine.
He built a private observatory on Jakku to keep an eye on the “solar storms, rogue magnetospheres, black holes, gravity wells, and things far stranger” that make it virtually impossible to map and navigate the Unknown Regions. Perhaps this will be the basis of Benioff and Weiss’ trilogy.
The Clone Wars
The Clone Wars period had been well-documented in animated TV series and even a theatrically released feature film, but we haven’t seen it fully realized in live-action on the big screen. Attack of the Clones touched on it, although all of the clones were created using CGI – and it was primitive 2002 CGI at that – and we didn’t get the weight of the battle.
Now that anything can be accomplished on film, maybe it’s time for the definitive cinematic take on the Clone Wars, with breathtaking visuals, vibrant action sequences, and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi in the heat of battle.
Episodes X-XII
Disney has repeatedly said that the core Star Wars saga – i.e. the ones with “Episode” in the title – will end with The Rise of Skywalker. But what if the “Episode” movies can still continue outside the story of the Skywalker bloodline? If you’re going to commit to releasing an entire trilogy of films, then you’d better be certain that people are going to want to watch all three of them.
It’s not good enough that they’ll check out the first one to see if they like it and maybe give the second and third ones a miss. Making Episodes X through XII is really the only way to guarantee that moviegoers will definitely turn out to see them.
Star Wars: Underworld
When Disney bought Lucasfilm, Lucas was planning an ambitious TV drama called Star Wars: Underworld that would be set between the prequel and original trilogies. It was said to be “gritty and dark” in tone, taking influence from the film noirs of the ‘40s, and set in a “period when the Empire is trying to take things over,” focusing on criminal activity and political struggles.
There were over 100 episodes planned with 50 scripts already written when Disney swooped in and pulled the plug on the show. Since Underworld sounds like a Game of Thrones take on the Star Wars universe, maybe this is why Benioff and Weiss have been hired – to rework those scripts and storylines into an epic GoT-style trilogy.
Something new entirely
A lot of people are talking about Benioff and Weiss’ trilogy as though they’re going to focus on something in the established canon, but there’s a good chance they’ll just create a batch of new characters and tell a brand new story in this wonderful fictional world. Surely that would be a better idea than taking something that fans have been obsessing over for years and trying to do it justice.
There’s no harm in creating something entirely new and letting the fans decide if it’s something they’re interested in, without being tied to the past. New stories are always more exciting than rehashing what we once loved anyway.
