You’ll Get One New Star Wars Movie A Year Starting In 2015

Star Wars

Apparently Disney intends to reap as much money as it can out of its aquisition of Lucasfilm in as short a period of time as possible:

Walt Disney Pictures and Lucasfilm announced today at CinemaCon in Las Vegas that Star Wars: Episode VII will hit theaters in the summer of 2015 and that every summer after that will offer a “Star Wars” film, alternating with one of the standalone films.

We knew they were targeting “Episode VII” for 2015, but a summer date had not yet been confirmed. Also, while it was known they were working on standalone films, the fact that we’ll be getting a “Star Wars” movie every summer is a new development.

As one industry writer puts it, this is a pretty aggressive strategy:

We’ve known that Disney has been working with the idea of doing many new Star Wars films, beginning with the announcement that there could be one every two to three years, as stated when Disney bought LucasFilm. We’ve also heard that spin-offs might alternate with the core storyline. But this is the first studio confirmation of a plan, and also a pretty aggressive statement. Disney really isn’t messing around with the Star Wars franchise.

Well if by messing around you mean “engaging in a strategy designed to make as much money as possible in a short period of time, you’d be right. But it strikes me that they risk over-saturating the market by going this route. To some degree, that’s what happened with Star Trek starting in the mid-1990s. It was only until the 2009 re-boot that the franchise really started to revive itself. The sequel to the reboot is being released some four years after the original movie came out.  Maybe Disney’s strategy will work, but it strikes me that they’re taking a big risk here, especially if the fans react to the movie in the same way they did the Prequels.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Dave Schuler says:

    I don’t know what we’ve done to you that you should threaten us that way. 😉

  2. JWH says:

    Star Wars: Jar-Jar, Episode XIV. Coming in 2029.

  3. Brett says:

    Fans haven’t gotten tired of having a new Marvel comic book movie released every summer, so I don’t think they’ll get tired of this. They just need for the first new movie to be a success, and then they can churn them out barring a Narnia-style franchise failure.

  4. stonetools says:

    @Dave Schuler:

    I find your lack of enthusiasm disturbing….

  5. Apparently Disney intends to reap as much money as it can out of its accusation of Lucasfilm in as short a period of time as possible

    Paging Dr. Freud…

  6. Yes, yes.

  7. Ben says:

    Ugh. This is going to be awful. JJ Abrams was the perfectly wrong choice. This is the man who managed to turn Star Trek into Transformers-esque CGI-fest.

  8. grumpy realist says:

    Oh, c’mon. Remember some of those wonderful Star Trek episodes of the 3rd season? “Spock’s brain: a bunch of alien women filch Spock’s brain to run their mah-johnng set.” How can you give up a possiblity like that?

    Anyway, I think the whole Star Wars franchise pretty well imploded with the fourth movie–“Galactic Menace” or whatever they called it.