… as if thousands of marketing execs saw the upcoming release schedule for Star Wars-related stuff and squealed until their heads went all Scanners. Seriously, we wanted to post all of these news bits as they were coming up over the week, but they were coming across like a swarm of TIE fighters.
- We now have a release date for Episode VIII: All the Moneys in May of 2017, even though Episode VII hasn’t hit theaters yet. This strikes me as a much safer bet than releasing the date for when Fantastic Four 2 is going to hit, since nothing I’ve seen from the new F4 movie makes me think it’ll manage to be better than Elektra. That being said, glad that they’re getting back to a May release schedule
- The first official stand-alone movie, Rogue One, has been announced, along with its star, Felicity Jones (fresh off her Oscar-nominated performance in Theory of Everything). Gareth Edwards, the guy who brought us a Godzilla movie that wasn’t about Godzilla, is set to direct, while Chris Weitz, who inflicted the Nutty Professor II upon the world.
I look forward to a story about the most elite Rebel Squadron in a movie that won’t feature X-Wings but does have pilots in fat suits. Seriously, I have a bad feeling about this one, even with Felicity Jones involved - In case you weren’t overloaded just yet, Disney also announced that there are a staggering 20 books coming up to lead up to The Force Awakens. The title list makes it fairly clear that not all of these are novels, some look to be kids/YA books or technical manuals (which were awesome back in the day)
- Not enough yet? Okay, well, Marvel is also putting out a new “canonical” comic series (they keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means) that will bridge between Episode VI and Episode VII, maybe explaining how there is still an empire and all the stuff they fought against still out there. This one I find quite a bit more exciting than the books, as the newer comics (Star Wars, Darth Vader, and Princess Leia) have all been fairly decent. Ace and I don’t agree on the Star Wars series, but what other comic would give us Vader in a runway pose? The full poster is at the end of the post
- For those of you with an iOS device (you unwashed masses with the Android nonsense can go wanting*), you can go check out Disney and Topp’s (how are they still around?) app that mixes the classic trading cards of my childhood with these new and unknown characters from Episode VII (as well as the PT, Rebels, etc). It’d say it’s a nice walk down memory lane, but since it seems like they want to charge me to open cards that don’t exist, it’s something I’m going to take a big fat pass on*Just kidding… mostly
