It may feel like everyone is watching Game of Thrones right now, but that’s not true! I’m pretty sure Disney head Bob Iger has not been seeing the recent season and how poorly it’s going. Io9 reports, “While speaking at the MoffetNathanson Media & Communications summit, Walt Disney Company chairman Bob Iger confirmed that the next Star Wars film following The Rise of Skywalker will come from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss." Said Iger:
“We did a deal with David Benioff and D.B Weiss, who are famous for Game of Thrones, and the next movie that we release will be theirs,” Iger said. “And we’re not saying anything more about that.”
Last week we learned that Disney had scheduled new Star Wars movies for 2022, 2024, and 2026, but there was no specification if these movies would be from D.B. Weiss and David Beinoff or from Rian Johnson. Now it looks like Weiss and Benioff’s first Star Wars film is at least at the stage where Disney is ready to move forward.
Benioff and Weiss were brought on to do Star Wars in February 2018. All that was reported at the time was that the new films would be “separate from both the episodic Skywalker saga and the recently-announced trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson, writer-director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” However, at Celebration last month, producer Kathleen Kennedy said that Benioff and Weiss were working with Johnson to map out the future of Star Wars. There weren’t many specifics on what that meant, but I assume it’s to make sure that there wasn’t any overlap in the stories they were planning to tell.
On the one hand, I get Disney’s show of faith in Benioff and Weiss. Bob Iger doesn’t care about lore or character development or story as much as he cares about being able to steer massive franchises. Game of Thrones, regardless of how you feel about the recent seasons, is a major property that makes a lot of money. It is a hit, and now Disney wants Benioff and Weiss to make another hit under the Star Wars banner. It’s just a shame that lately they’ve shown their writing chops to be weak and ineffective.
The good news is we all know what a bad Star Wars movies looks like with the prequels. Maybe Benioff and Weiss will surprise us with their movie, and if they don’t, Star Wars will endure all the same.
