Next ‘Star Wars’ Movie Must Be the Right One, Says Bob Iger
On the heels of this week’s report about Lucasfilm putting two previously announced Star Wars films on the back burner, Disney CEO Bob Iger has weighed in on the topic, saying that they are focusing on getting the next theatrical event from a galaxy far, far away to be the best possible one.
Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference (via The Hollywood Reporter), Iger reiterated previous statements of his saying that the company is looking at prioritizing quality over quantity, and spending their money more reasonably:
“I’m really pleased that the support that I’m getting from the content creators of the company is significant and real, and it comes in the form of reducing the expense per content, whether it’s a TV series or a film, where costs have just skyrocketed in a huge way and not a supportable way in my opinion. They all agree to that, understanding how much volume we need, reducing how much we make. So it’s how much we spend on what we make and how much we make.”
That was referring to the overall Disney company, including Marvel, live-action Disney films, and animation; but he quickly shifted the focus over to Star Wars, saying that they’ve been regrouping after the release of the sequel trilogy, and after evaluating their successes and failures, they are now concentrating on the next Star Wars theatrical film, which they are being very careful about:
“Star Wars, we made three what we called saga films, which is obviously the successors to George Lucas’ first six. They did very well at the box office — tremendously well as a matter of fact. We’ve made two so-called stand-alones in Rogue One and Solo. Rogue One did quite well, Solo was a little disappointing to us. It gave us pause just to think maybe the cadence was a little too aggressive. And so we decided to pull back a bit. We still are developing Star Wars films. We’re going to make sure that when we make one, that it’s the right one, so we are being very careful there.”
Personal feelings aside, Iger’s statement comes across as very factual, concentrating on the box office grosses of the films they’ve made and not the response from the audience. He acknowledges once again that after Solo disappointed the studio at the box office, they started re-evaluating their pipeline. At one point, Lucasfilm had announced that they would be releasing one Star Wars movie a year for the foreseeable future; but those plans were halted in early summer of 2018, when Disney looked at the money they’d spent on Solo (a movie they had to shoot nearly twice and that Iger himself insisted on being released four weeks after the biggest movie of the year, their own Avengers: Infinity War) and how much they’d made at the box office ($392 million).
At the time, that paused development of an Obi-Wan Kenobi film that was weeks away from being announced, with the story partially being retooled into the Disney Plus series we got in 2022. The success of Rogue One, at the same time, was enough to justify a prequel series focused on Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor. After some troubled early development, Tony Gilroy took over the project in 2019, and in late 2020, they started shooting a two-season series that aired its first 12 episodes last year to critical acclaim. The show is expected to be a major player by the time the Emmy Awards announce their nominations this summer. A second season is now in production.
As far as the future goes, we know there are a few projects in the pipeline. Damon Lindelof pitched an idea to Lucasfilm that seems to be coming to fruition sooner rather than later — an announcement at Star Wars Celebration in April is to be expected, with production set to begin before the end of the year. The studio has also signed Shawn Levy to develop a film for them once he’s completed work on Deadpool 3. Also in good shape is Taika Waititi’s film, which might have a draft of the script circling the Lucasfilm headquarters at this point — Waititi is currently in negotiations to star in it as well.
Stay tuned for more on the upcoming Star Wars film slate.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
