Disney Confirms Next Star Wars Film Coming From Game of Thrones Co-Creators
Game of Thrones is currently the most talked about piece of pop culture entertainment in the world. Especially now that Avengers: Endgame has been out for a while, everybody is either talking about Game of Thrones or complaining about how much people are talking about Game of Thrones. That won’t change for at least another week, with the finale coming this Sunday, and now the official word is in about another massive franchise—Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are behind the next Star Wars film.
i09 reports that Walt Disney Company chairman Bob Iger confirmed as much during the MoffetNathanson Media & Communications Summit. Benioff and Weiss’s film will come out in 2022 and follow this year’s release of J.J. Abrams Skywalker saga-capping The Rise of Skywalker.
“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.”
There will be…a lot of feelings about this. It was only last week that we learned Disney had slated three new Star Wars films to be released in 2022, 2024, and 2026. We weren’t certain if this would be the trilogy Rian Johnson is working on, or if it was indeed going to be the start of Benioff and Weiss’s Star Wars careers. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said that all three men were working out the particulars of their separate (we think) Star Wars installments at the Star Wars Celebration this past April. Now we have confirmation that the 2022 film, at least, belongs to the Game of Thrones guys.
Whatever your feelings about this season of GoT, or the series in general, handing the franchise over to the guys behind one of the most massive, ambitious television series of all times makes practical sense. Considering they’ve no doubt heard the many, many takes on their flagship HBO show, perhaps they’ll approach this other, vaunted franchise with fresh ideas on character development, plotting, and more.
We’ll let you know more when we do.
Featured image: The Millenium Falcon in STAR WARS: EPISODE IX. Courtesy Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Studios