Colin Trevorrow

In news that seemed somewhat inevitable from Day One, Colin Trevorrow has reportedly exited Star Wars: Episode IX. Trevorrow’s departure comes after a bumpy year for the director, whose latest film, The Book of Henry, was met with largely negative reviews (to say the least). It also comes just a few months after Lucasfilm parted ways with directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller, replacing them with Ron Howard, who is currently completing production on the untitled Han Solo spinoff.

Script rewrites happen, especially on giant tentpole science fiction franchises like, for instance, Star Wars. Episode IX is getting an assist from Jack Thorne, who sounds like he should be searching for hidden treasure in the Amazon but is, in fact, a screenwriter responsible for the BBC’s His Dark Materials series and upcoming Julia Roberts and Jacob Tremblay movie Wonder.

I’ve always found the intersection of fan culture and Hollywood to be endlessly fascinating. When Joss Whedon took over the reigns of Marvel’s The Avengers, for example, it kicked off a period where a filmmaker’s talent behind-the-scenes was less important than their reverence for the source material. Whedon once wrote a series of X-Men comic books; Duncan Jones had spent years playing the Warcraft MMORPG; Neill Blomkamp adored the Alien franchise; Rian Johnson was an unparalleled Star Wars nerd. It was no longer enough for a studio to hire a director with vision and talent, you also needed to hire someone who identified - or could as least pass a skill check - with the very audience you were trying to target.

Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry did not exactly make Jurassic World money in its first week, and the reviews have mostly been a combination of critics wondering how this movie got greenlit, other critics wondering why Trevorrow chose this for his follow-up to the highest-grossing film ever made, and the rest wondering if they’d accidentally ingested some form of edibles before their screening. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a pretty terrible movie, so bad that many are still wondering how long Trevorrow will remain director of the final Star Wars Episode.

Earlier this week, we learned that Colin Trevorrow had asked for a small favor from Rian Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. While the exact nature of the thing remains a mystery, we do know that it’s a small moment in a scene that will probably make sense once Trevorrow’s Episode IX comes out.

Just how far in advance is this overarching Star Wars saga planned out? Episode VIII, The Last Jedi, is on post-production now and headed to theaters this winter. Episode IX is in development, building off the events of that film. So how much of Episode VIII was set in stone, and when, to give Episode IX enough time to be fully developed and fleshed out? And is that movie setting the stage for an Episode X, and so on and so forth? These are the questions a man thinks to himself when he writes on the interwebs all day.

Whether you are someone who loved or hated Jurassic World when it first hit theaters, there’s probably something we can all agree on: the movie needed itself some Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm  —  mathematician-turned-dinosaur-expert-turned-intellectual-action-hero  —  is one of the standouts of both the original Jurassic Park film and its sequel, and the news that Goldblum would be returning for Colin Trevorrow’s sequel was a welcome one. Goldblum may not have been enough to save Independence Day: Resurgence, but its a quantifiable fact that all movies are better with a little bit of his signature ‘ums’ and ‘ahs.’

With all the new pieces in play in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it sure seems like Lucasfilm is setting the Star Wars universe up to go somewhere special. Once Kathleen Kennedy and company made the decision to blow up the preexisting Star Wars canon, we watched firsthand as they began the process of stitching together a new continuity. There were Star Wars books explaining the events that followed Return of the Jedi, new television shows that wove together the old and new trilogies, and even video games fleshing out some of the new planets and species we’d seen in The Force Awakens.

We were really excited when we heard that Rian Johnson would not only be directing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but had also signed on to write a treatment for Episode IX. He’s definitely accomplished the first thing, but unfortunately, he confirmed that he would no longer be working on the script for the final Star Wars movie.

When Lucasfilm initially announced Star Wars: Episode IX, the tentative plan was to release it in theaters on May 23, 2019 — that date was never confirmed, however, and when the studio shifted their releases to December (with the exception of the young Han Solo spinoff), everyone just assumed that it was only a matter of time before Episode IX’s release date was changed, too. That’s definitely not the case, as Disney and Lucasfilm have announced a metric Jabba-ton of new release dates, officially confirming the final film in their Star Wars trilogy for May 24, 2019.