'Godzilla' Director Gareth Edwards To Helm 'Star Wars' Spin-off Set For 2016 Release

Gareth Edwards, Star Wars

The career of Gareth Edwards is one that would make a film school student envious. His first film, “Monsters,” was a labor of love, made on a shoestring budget, with the VFX largely done a laptop. The result? A solid indie highlighting a director with a real sense of mood and craft. That effort found him leveraged into the blockbuster “Godzilla,” and no matter what you thought of it, the movie was a huge smash, opening last weekend over $90 million at the box office. So what does Edwards do next? He’s doing to Disneyland. Kinda.

THR reports that he’ll direct one of the upcoming “Star Wars” spin-offs. Of course, given the shroud of secrecy around those movies, it’s not clear which one it will be, but rumors abound. Earlier this week, fanboys were stirred when a random German site, Star Wars Union (via Nerdist), claimed that a recent Hasbro training presentation revealed the following feature film plan:

Fall 2014: Rebels [animated series]
2015: Episode VII
2016: Boba Fett
2017: Episode VIII
2018: Solo
2019: Episode IX
2020: Red Five

Again, those are just rumored titles and it’s not clear which installment will fall Edwards’ way. But the film has been given a December 16, 2016 release date (which means the Boba Fett movie is those aforementioned plans are accurate) and will be penned by Gary Whitta whose credits include “After Earth” and “Book Of Eli.” Uh … great …

And while Edwards is attached to helm the brewing “Godzilla” sequel as well as “Godzilla 3,” they don’t even have scripts yet and are thus way off. All that said, we like the choice, and Edwards has good blockbuster instincts. Give him a better script than he got with “Godzilla,” and a cast that doesn’t involve Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and we think he could make something unique.

Which one do you want to see him do?