Nonfans might scoff, but the universe of Star Wars has more than an audience-it has followers. Marvel prototyped the process Lucasfilm is trying to industrialize it. It needs different kinds of writers and directors and a different way of looking at the structure of storytelling itself. It evolved from the narrative techniques not of auteur or blockbuster films but of comic books and TV, and porting that model over isn’t easy. The shared universe represents something rare in Hollywood: a new idea.
Brand awareness goes through the roof audiences get a steady, soothing mainline drip of familiar characters.įorget the business implications for a moment, though.
Universal continues, with limited success, to try to knit together its famous bestiary (Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, etc.).Įverywhere, studio suits are recruiting creatives who can weave characters and story lines into decades-spanning tapestries of prequels, side-quels, TV shows, games, toys, and so on. Paramount is working on a shared universe for its alien robot Transformers. Warner is also trying to introduce Godzilla to King Kong (again). Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad in 2016, Wonder Woman, and eventually the two-part team-up Justice League. Entertainment, which owns DC Comics, is prepping a dozen or so movies based on DC characters, with Batman v. So you’ll get interrelated comic-book movies there too. Thanks to licensing agreements, Disney doesn’t own the rights to every Marvel property-Fox makes movies about the X-Men and related mutants like Gambit and Deadpool. Disney also owns Marvel Comics, and over the next decade you can expect 17 more interrelated movies about Iron Man and his amazing friends, including Captain America: Civil War, two more Avengers movies, another Ant-Man, and a Black Panther (not to mention five new TV shows). Forget finite sequences now it’s about infinite series. That’s not the way the transnational entertainment business works anymore. Kathleen Kennedy, who oversees the Star Wars franchise for Lucasfilm, has produced 93 films in her career. Let me put it another way: If everything works out for Disney, and if you are (like me) old enough to have been conscious for the first Star Wars film, you will probably not live to see the last one.
The company intends to put out a new Star Wars movie every year for as long as people will buy tickets. And if the people at the Walt Disney Company, which bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012, have anything to say about it, the past four decades of Star Wars were merely prologue. It and its sequels (and TV movies and cartoons and toys and bedsheets) burrowed deep into popular culture. The picture that the Lucasfilm faithful relentlessly call A New Hope but everyone else calls Star Wars came out in 1977. It’s a stand-alone story-an “anthology” movie as opposed to a “saga” movie, in Lucasfilm parlance. Knoll’s idea became Rogue One, due out in December 2016. Abrams’ The Force Awakens, the seventh-oops, sorry: VIIth-movie to tell the story of Darth Vader’s family. The one that comes out December 18 is not Knoll’s sci-fi spy story. Apparently that’s how you get to make a Star Wars movie.īut not this movie. “That is a very good idea, John,” Kennedy said. It’s at the beginning of the movie, in the ribbon of text that sets the scene: “Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the Death Star.” The plans are the MacGuffin, the thing everyone is chasing.
Kennedy got Knoll’s reference, of course. “I just have this very simple idea,” Knoll said, “about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A New Hope who steal the plans for the Death Star.”
This was 2012, and even then, it was pretty clear Lucasfilm was going to make more Star Wars movies. He’s the chief creative officer at Lucasfilm he did the visual effects on the Star Wars “special editions” of the 1990s and a couple of Star Trek movies, among others. So it probably wasn’t a surprise-it was cool, even-when, right after Kennedy took over as head of Lucasfilm, the company George Lucas founded to make Star Wars, John Knoll walked into her office. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones series, the Jurassic Park series. For decades she worked with Steven Spielberg, producing E.T. Kathleen Kennedy has heard a lot of movie pitches.