Only yesterday, it felt like there were “Star Wars” movies and spin-offs scheduled up the wazoo, but it’s not going to be long before we actually run out of them. If the current release plans hold, we’ll get three films in the mega-franchise in the next twenty-four months — with “The Last Jedi” hitting this Christmas, the Han Solo spin-off landing in May 2018, and Colin Trevorrow’s “Episode IX” following a year later — but there’s nothing solid that’s been publicly announced after that.
As such, it’s probably fair to expect some announcements soon. Indeed, Kathleen Kennedy suggested at Star Wars Celebration recently to MTV that we’re likely to see an announcement in the summer, probably tied to the D23 or San Diego Comic-Con celebrations. The immediate frontrunner for the next Star Wars Story is likely to be a Boba Fett movie, which came within a whisker of being announced before original director Josh Trank fell out of favor with Lucasfilm. But an intriguing, if far from substantiated, rumor over the weekend suggested that we could be seeing something else on the slate too.
The site Omega Underground reports from two separate sources that Sam Esmail, the writer-director who came to fame as the creator of USA’s cult hit drama “Mr. Robot” has been meeting with Lucasfilm regarding a “Star Wars” movie, and it’s likely a spin-off focused on Obi-Wan Kenobi. Persistent rumors, or at least wishful thinking, have suggested that a Kenobi-centric spin-off set between “Revenge Of The Sith” and “A New Hope” is one of the projects under consideration, so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the studio to be seeking talent for it.
And Esmail, as one of the most hotly-touted auteurs of the peak TV era, would certainly be the kind of name that we can see Kennedy and co taking meetings with for such a project. That said, it’s worth taking the report with a pinch or two of salt. We’re not sure of the site’s track record one way or another, but even they stress that this seems to be at a very early stage, and it’s likely that half of Hollywood have taken meetings similar to Esmail’s in the last few years.
Furthermore, Ewan McGregor, who played Kenobi in the prequels, recently told Entertainment Weekly, that while he’d be “happy to do it if they wanted to do it,” as far as they he was aware “they’ve got films to make until the 2020s, so I don’t think it’s going to happen soon if it happens at all.” Similarly, Esmail doesn’t just showrun “Mr. Robot” and write the bulk of it, but he also directs the entire seasons as well, and he’s developing a new miniseries version of “Metropolis” too, so his schedule is unlikely to clear up any time soon.
As such, this is one to file under ‘one to keep an eye on’ rather than ‘take it to the bank,’ but stranger things have happened.
