Much as we are already ignoring our current political issues and looking forward to the 2016 elections, we have begun looking past Star Wars: Episode VII—which has already become a reality, and therefore can no longer be shaped by outsider pundits—to the future, where those untold numbers of sequels and spinoffs await. Disney has previously discussed plans to alternate chapters of the new Star Wars trilogy with standalone “origin story” films, with many reports saying the first two of those would follow a young Han Solo and a younger-and-not-yet-eaten Boba Fett.
And now new rumors confirming those—and hinting at the third spinoff film—have emerged through a German fan site that was reporting on a strategy meeting from Hasbro, thus creating the secondhand, speculative chain of hearsay and disorder in which Star Wars news thrives. According to those rumors, the timeline for new Star Wars projects (and their action-figure tie-ins) is as follows:
• 2014: Rebels
• 2015: Episode VII
• 2016: Boba Fett
• 2017: Episode VIII
• 2018: Solo
• 2019: Episode IX
• 2020: Red Five
That schedule obviously includes this year’s toy line for the Disney cartoon Rebels, as well as the already-scheduled 2015 release for Episode VII, but it’s everything beyond that’s far more uncertain and fun to argue about pointlessly. Boba Fett has already been rumored to have a story treatment from Lawrence Kasdan (and more recent rumors of Disney executives struggling with that story), so it would seem to jibe that it’s definitely being planned, alongside the young Han Solo movie that will struggle mightily against jokes about Shia LaBeouf.
But it’s 2020’s Red Five that’s something of a surprise, suggesting the film could be about Luke Skywalker’s time under that call sign as an X-Wing pilot (before the events of Empire Strikes Back, say); that time Anakin Skywalker coincidentally flew under that call sign in the Clone Wars, a story we definitely didn’t get enough of already; or maybe about that time a black guy who wasn’t Lando Calrissian or Mace Windu made the mistake of showing up in a Star Wars movie.
Of course, there’s also the possibility that Red Five is just the name of another animated series, or some other, ancillary arm of the Star Wars franchise—a game a la Rogue Squadron, for example. There’s also the possibility that this news is completely suspect, coming as it does from a Hasbro toy event being reported on by Germans, possibly as a complex mind game. However, lending it some credence, Hasbro has since asked that site (and others who reported it, like Jedi News) to take it down—which, as always, is all the confirmation anyone needs to spend the rest of the day discussing it.
[via Gamma Squad]