George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy Talk the Future of STAR WARS; Reveal They’ve Already Met with Writers for EPISODE VII

A tiny bit of news broke this afternoon, as it was announced that Disney was acquiring George Lucas‘ LucasFilm and a new Star Wars film is being planned for release in 2015.  Naturally, the internet went a little nuts.  There was a bit of confusion surrounding the initial news nugget, but we learned a bit more as Disney and LucasFilm started revealing the details of the deal.  Star Wars: Episode 7 will kick off a new trilogy, with LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy overseeing the franchise as the executive producer while Lucas acts as a creative consultant.

In concert with the acquisition news, Lucas and Kennedy released a video online explaining why the decision was made to sell the company to Disney and what this means for Star Wars going forward.  Hit the jump to see what they had to say.

Click here to read our initial article regarding the Star Wars: Episode 7 news.

Click here to read our editorial regarding who should direct the new Star Wars films.

Click here to watch Lucas and Disney CEO Bob Iger discuss the acquisition.

Lucas begins by explaining why he decided to step away from the company and why Disney is the perfect fit for Lucasfilm:

“Obviously I’ve been talking about retiring for several years now.  I wanted to get into sort of another stage of life where I’m not in the film business anymore, where I don’t have to run a corporation.  It occurred to me one day that the perfect person to run the company was Kathy [Kennedy].  It’s just such a perfect fit, and I felt that I really wanted to put the company somewhere in a larger entity that would protect it.  Disney is a huge corporation; they have all kinds of capabilities and faciliites.  There’s a lot of strength to be gained by this.”

In this afternoon’s press release, it was revealed that a treatment for Episode 7 has already been written and an outline is already done for Episodes 8 and 9.  Lucas reveals in the video that he’s written the treatments for the new trilogy, and he handed over all the Star Wars story nuggets that he’s accumulated over the years to Kennedy:

“I always said I wasn’t going to do anymore, and that’s true, I’m not going to do anymore.  But that doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to turn it over to Kathy [Kennedy] to do more.  I have story treatments of 7, 8, and 9, and a bunch of other movies and obviously we have hundreds of books and comics and everything you could possibly imagine.  So I sort of moved that treasure trove of stories and various things to Kathy, and I have complete confidence that she’s gonna take them and make great movies.”

Kennedy revealed that they’ve already started talking to writers about penning the screenplay for Episode 7:

“We are absolutely going to make Star Wars movies and we’re in the midst of the really fun part of the process which is we’re sitting down with a couple of writers and we’re starting to discuss ideas and we’re starting to talk about what those stories might be.”

Though I’m sure they’d be abruptly abducted and never heard from again if they opened their mouth, I’m incredibly interested to hear what screenwriters Kennedy has been talking to about handling the script for the next Star Wars film.  Hopefully we hear more soon, though I’m sure we won’t be lacking for Star Wars rumors in the coming weeks.

Watch the full video below: