Kathleen Kennedy Revealed Star Wars Standalone Films Were George Lucas' Idea, Talks the Future of the Franchise

As the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is getting closer, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy is sharing some information regarding the Star Wars franchise. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Kennedy talked about the future of the franchise and revealed that the Star Wars standalone films were Lucas' idea.

When discussing how Lucas helped in coming up with ideas for the standalone films, she said:

"George talked to me about doing this when I first came aboard. He had often thought about doing it and he had actually written down three or four thoughts and ideas, directions you could go. Obviously inside the mythology there were lots of opportunities. So that was the first conversation I had."

As for the Rogue One idea, Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor John Knoll came up with that. Kennedy went on to talk about the types of stories they discussed:

"No, we certainly talked about origin type stories, but we didn't get into the specifics of that," Kennedy said. "We talked a lot about the Jedi and the foundational ideas that George had thought about when he created the mythology. It was sort of spit-balling ideas."

Kennedy also confirmed that the standalone films will not include an opening crawl:

"More than likely we will not have a crawl. We feel that that is proprietary with the saga films. But how this evolves…? We haven't fully decided, and [traditional Star Wars elements] may be pretty spare for this first one."

I don't see the need for opening crawls for non-saga films. I think adding that in standalone films would just be redundant. Kennedy went to discuss the future of Star Wars films:

"That's a conversation going on right now, too. I have to honestly tell you, could we [do nothing but stand-alones]? Sure. But I don't know. We are looking at all of that…There are [possible movies] that we have been talking a lot about but we are planning to sit down in January, since we will have had The Force Awakens released, now Rogue One, and we've finished shooting Episode VIII. We have enough information where we can step back a little bit and say, What are we doing? What do we feel is exciting? And what are some of the things we want to explore?"

As of right now, the studio has no plans to do another trilogy after Star Wars: Episode IX, which will be released in 2019. Next year, we'll see Rian Johnson's Star Wars: Episode VIII, and the year after that, the untitled Han Solo film directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, but we still don't know what they'll release after Episode IX. It's likely that the third standalone Star Wars film will be Boba Fett-centric since a recent report claimed that Josh Trank's film would tell the origins of the fan-favorite bounty hunter.

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