When Disney completed its shock purchase of Lucasfilm back in October, the studio announced that it would relaunch the Star Wars saga with a new sequel trilogy, as well as expanding the franchise with standalone features based upon the various inhabitants of the galaxy far, far away.
Of course, with Star Trek Into Darkness director J.J. Abrams confirmed as helming Star Wars: Episode VII, Disney is moving full-steam ahead on the latest chapter of the epic space opera, but CEO Bob Iger has now revealed that Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back) and Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past) are both working on standalone Star Wars projects: “We working on films derived from great Star Wars characters that are not part of the overall saga, so we still plan to make Star Wars VII, VIII and IX roughly over a six year period of time starting in 2015. But there are going to be a few other films released in that period of time, too.”
If Harry Knowles of Aint It Cool News is to be believed, the first of these films will centre on the Jedi Master Yoda, while Harry also goes on to claim that George Lucas has apparently been tossing around an idea for a Jabba the Hutt movie. Now this could be little more than speculation, but considering Yoda’s popularity – not to mention the fact that that he has 900 years of backstory to mine – it would seem inevitable that we’ll see a Yoda movie at some point in time. In fact, you can bet your life that a Yoda movie has already been discussed (and a Han Solo movie, and a Boba Fett movie, and about fifty other movies), and it wouldn’t surprise me if this does turn out to be one of the two additional Star Wars films that Disney has in the pipeline. I just hope the other one doesn’t have any Jedi…
So, who would you like to see taking centre stage in a standalone Star Wars movie? Personally, I’m going with Biggs Darklighter…