JJ Abrams is returning to the Star Wars universe to helm the third episode of the new Star Wars trilogy, following the ousting of previous director Colin Trevorrow.
Abrams – who also directed 2015’s Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the first theatrical film in the series for a decade – will co-write the film with Chris Terrio, according to a press release on StarWars.com.
‘With The Force Awakens, JJ delivered everything we could have possibly hoped for, and I am so excited that he is coming back to close out this trilogy,’ Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said in the release.
Striking back: JJ Abrams (left, sharing a Twizzler with Chewbacca in 2015) is to take over as writer and director of Star Wars: Episode IX, which is set for release in May 2019
Force majeure: Previous director Colin Trevorrow (pictured), who helmed Jurassic World, was kicked off after he and Lucasfilm could not agree on a script after two years of development
As well as helming The Force Awakens, which made more than $2 billion at the box office, Abrams, 51, also directed two successful entries in the rebooted Star Trek franchise.
So his return suggests that Lucasfilm is eager to get the Star Wars back in safe hands after 40-year-old Trevorrow’s surprise departure.
Trevorrow – who directed 2015’s Jurassic World as well as 2017 critical and financial bomb The Book of Henry – was announced as writer and director of Episode IX back in August 2015.
But last Tuesday Lucasfilm announced that he had left the film ‘by mutual agreement’.
In the Wars: Abrams (pictured) will have a struggle ahead of him to meet the scheduled production date of February 2018, and the eventual May 2019 release date
That was because he and the studio still couldn’t agree on the script after more than two years on the project, Variety reported.
But even with a huge amount of experience overseeing massive sci-fi franchises – he’s also produced Lost, Fringe and Person of Interest for TV – Abrams has his work cut out for him.
Episode IX, which is still awaiting an official subtitle, is still scheduled for release in May 2019.
But that’s going to be a struggle to manage, with no finished script and production due to start in five months. It remains to be seen whether Lucasfilm will try to maintain that same schedule.
In the meantime, the Rian Johnson-helmed Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is set to be released on December 15 of this year.
Lucasfilm enjoyed a friction-free development with Johnson, who is also known for critically acclaimed time-travel flick Looper, and crime film Brick and conman caper The Brothers Bloom.
However, Johnson is likely too busy wrapping up The Last Jedi to even think about taking on the next entry in the franchise.
The Trevorrow debacle is just the latest in a string of director disasters to befall Lucasfilm and its parent company Disney.
While things have gone smoothly up to this point with its main Star Wars franchise, the other series – a string of prequels and side-stories that alternate release years with the new trilogy – have been marred by disaster.
Having a ball: Abrams had a smooth shoot for 2015’s The Force Awakens (pictured), and was likely brought back so the franchise could be left in a safe pair of hands
Last but not least: Rian Johnson, who directed this year’s The Last Jedi (pictured) also had a trouble-free shoot, but was likely too busy wrapping it up to take on the new project
Prequel Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, released in 2016, underwent extensive reshoots after director Gareth Edwards finished filming.
Bourne Legacy director Tony Gilroy was paid $5 million to shoot new footage, including more scenes with Darth Vader, and was given an equal amount of say as Edwards in the editing suite.
And in June 2015 Josh Trank – who directed that year’s legendary box office bomb, Fantastic Four – was dropped by Disney from an unnamed Star Wars spinoff.
But Disney’s biggest mess-up to date has involved their next movie after the release of The Last Jedi – a prequel based around the early years of smuggler Han Solo.
Set for release in 2018, the as-yet-untitled film was being directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of the Jump Street and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs films.
They were unceremoniously booted from production on June 20 after complaints about the duo’s freewheeling directing style, Entertainment Weekly reported at the time.
The pair had taken the script – by Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the much-loved Empire Strikes Back in the 1980s – and added gags and ad-libbed dialogue.
They thought they were making a comedy film; Kennedy wanted them to bring a ‘comedic touch’ to an otherwise straight-up sci-fi romp.
In the end, Ron Howard, of Apollo 13 fame, was brought in to reshoot swathes of the film.
DID CHILD ABUSE MOVIE KILL TREVORROW’S STAR WARS FILM?
After the commercial success of 2015’s Jurassic World – which made a massive $1.7 billion at the box office on a relatively modest $150 million budget – Colin Trevorrow seemed like a natural to take on Star Wars.
After all, both franchises began with the backing of Steven Spielberg, who handpicked Trevorrow for Jurassic World, and are heavy on the CGI.
Here today, gone Trevorrow: Was Colin Trevorrow’s departure due to The Book of Henry, his 2017 box-office bomb about child abuse? Some say so
But speculation has it that he was fired, at least in part, for his 2017 follow-up to the tourist-chomping blockbuster, the widely lambasted child abuse story The Book of Henry.
An indie passion project, Trevorrow shot the Naomi Watts-starring drama for a measly $10 million, but it only made $4.4 million at the box office.
It focuses on an 11-year-old genius who tries to stop his young neighbor from being abused by her stepfather, a politically connected police commissioner.
He then tries to persuade his mother to kill the man using an ingenious plan that would allow her to get away with it scot-free.
The film’s uneven combination of controversial subject matter and schmaltzy pre-teen genius kookiness led to it being lambasted by critics.
Variety said Henry’s ‘badness expands and metastasizes, taking on a jaw-dropping life of its own.’
Meanwhile, The Guardian opined that ‘in its pure misjudged ickiness, bad-acting ropiness, and its quirksy, smirksy passive-aggressive tweeness, this insidiously terrible film could hardly get any more skin-crawling.’
And the reviews kept rolling in, until it scored an abysmal 22 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
An insider told Vulture that the film’s critical panning may have provided the trigger to drop Trevorrow, although they had been mulling it for some time because he was ‘difficult’ to work with.
‘During the making of Jurassic World, he focused a great deal of his creative energies on asserting his opinion,’ said the executive, who wanted anonymity, but was reportedly involved in the development of that film and ‘Henry’.
‘But because he had been personally hired by Spielberg, nobody could say, “You’re fired.”
‘Once that film went through the roof and he chose to do Henry, [Trevorrow] was unbearable. He had an egotistical point of view – and he was always asserting that.’
But Book of Henry could have been his downfall, it seems.
‘When the reviews for Book of Henry came out, there was immediately conjecture that Kathy was going to dump him because they weren’t thrilled with working with him anyway,’ the executive continues.
‘He’s a difficult guy. He’s really, really, really confident. Let’s call it that.’