Lucasfilm Has Had Some Issues Holding Onto Directors
Over the past few years, the Star Wars franchise has had a resurgence beginning with ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens.’ The idea that Lucasfilm had following that film was that they planned on making spin-off films for every off year that there wasn’t a main film. After only the second spin-off film’s release, Lucasfilm scrapped the idea to continue to make spin-offs. With the spin-offs not on the docket anymore, there were a lot of issues that came up with any future films. There was only one more spin-off that was supposed to be made after ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ and that was the Boba Fett movie.
There was no one who knew what was going on with that film other than the people working on it. ‘Solo’ didn’t do as well as Lucasfilm and Disney thought it would and decided that it just wasn’t worth making another spin-off film. With that in mind, the director left the next project and they called off the Boba Fett movie. Josh Trank was the director who was supposed to be working on the film, but decided to leave of his own accord. He recently made a statement about why he left the project in the first place.
Trank has said recently that the only reason that he quit the project of making the Boba Fett movie in the first place was because he was going to be let go. When ‘Solo’ under-performed in theaters Lucasfilm was cancelling movies on the docket, so it would only make sense that they were going to be letting him go. So before they could fire him as the director, he quit ahead of time. It has essentially become known by this point that Lucasfilm has had issues keeping directors due to “creative differences.” Whether this is why he actually quit is unknown, but it doesn’t change the fact that he quit due to the plans LucasFilm had in place.
Despite the fact that they said no more spin-off films would be made and the new trilogy is finished, Lucasfilm is continuing the franchise. Of course there are shows in development for the franchise, but there were no other films lined up. That is, until recently when Lucasfilm announced that they would be having Taika Waititi directing the next Star Wars film. No one other than those working directly on the film have any idea what kind of film it will be, but with Waititi directing, there is some hope. The only question now is whether he will be staying on the project by the time filming begins.