Director Rian Johnson is truly creating an all-new story for his upcoming Star Wars trilogy.
While J.J. Abrams is poised to close out the new Star Wars trilogy with Episode IX, the galaxy far, far away finds itself in Johnson’s hands moving forward. It was recently announced that the director of the upcoming The Last Jedi is developing a new film Star Wars trilogy completely separate from the Skywalker family’s multigenerational saga. But those hoping Johnson might draw inspiration from one of the most popular Extended Universe eras will have to stick with the Old Republic’s video game origins, because the director is definitively not tackling it.
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“Oh, they love Knights of the Old Republic,” Johnson told Mashable during a recent Last Jedi press junket. “I played that game when it first came out and it was like, God, I loved it. Yeah, that’s a fantastic game. And I understand it, the instinct to automatically go to something that you know and love, that you’ve already seen.”
It’s an instinct that Johnson refuses to indulge, however, saying that his trilogy will be something entirely new to the Star Wars canon.
“To me, what’s really fun is the notion of what new stuff are we gonna see, what new stories can we tell?”
While the Old Republic and the KOTOR video games are full of potential film material, it’s understandable, and even encouraging that Johnson is committed to crafting something wholly original and not beholden to anything from the past. Besides, there’s also that annoying little technicality that all Extended Universe material was declared apocryphal when Disney bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise.
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While his new trilogy is in the very early stages of development, Johnson’s The Last Jedi, is fast approaching, hitting theaters on December 15.