Author: Dunc

The administrator of this facility. Not the only Club Jader, just the one who posts the most. Also tweets too much. Hates bios.
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Live-action Star Wars series has a $100M budget, 10 episodes

The New York Times takes a look at Disney’s upcoming streaming service and executive Ricky Strauss, who has oversight of the programming. But for our immediate purposes, there is one new nugget here: Jon Favreau’s live-action Star Wars series has a rough budget of “$100 million for 10 episodes.”

“‘Star Wars’ is a big world, and Disney’s new streaming service affords a wonderful opportunity to tell stories that stretch out over multiple chapters,” Mr. Favreau said in an email. He added of Mr. Strauss: “Marketing is about telling a story, and his background in that area allows us to collaborate and create new content.”

Information on the Favreau series is thin on the ground, but we do know he’s writing the whole season, it will feature brand-new characters, and it’s set three years after Return of the Jedi.

$10M an episode is roughly equivalent to the episode budget for past episodes of Game of Thrones. The final season of that show is now up to $15M an episode, per Variety last year. High-end TV episodes generally come out to about $5 million-$7 million an hour. The $10M price tag also puts this in the range of The Crown, which is one of Netflix’s most expensive shows.

We also get a timeline for when Disney’s new movies will stop rolling out to Netflix: March’s Captain Marvel will be the first to go to the new service, which means we can expect Solo on Netflix.

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Report: Disney wants Star Wars back from TBS, TNT

Disney is trying to buy back the broadcast rights to Star Wars from Turner Broadcasting, which currently has them through 2024, says Bloomberg. They apparently want them for their own streaming service.

I admit that I am a bit doubtful, since it seems like streaming and broadcast rights for older titles ought to be separate? But I’m hardly an expert on this sort of minutiae, and Disney might want the exclusivity for their own service regardless of what the TBS/TNT deal allows.

TNT started showing the first two trilogies in September 2016, and got The Force Awakens this year. Rogue One is due in 2019 – if Disney doesn’t find the magic number to get them back, that is. The TNT deal was reportedly worth “at least $250 million” – Bloomberg pegs it as $275 million, and says TNT wants “programming to replace the lost films” as well.

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Thrawn: Alliances debuts at #1 on NYT bestseller list

Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn: Alliances will debut at #1 on the New York Times’ bestseller list next week, Random House has announced. This is the fifth adult Star Wars novel overall and only the second non-adaptation to make it to the top of the list. Zahn is also the only Star Wars author to have two #1s in the franchise – his first being Heir to the Empire back in 1991.

Plenty of Star Wars books make the top 10, but other previous NYT #1s include Alan Dean Foster’s The Force Awakens in 2015, Sean Williams’ The Force Unleashed novelization in 2008 and Terry Brooks’ The Phantom Menace novelization in 1999. E.K. Johnston’s Ahsoka was #1 on the Young Adult chart in 2016.

There’s also a new Zahn interview at Yahoo, where he discusses the new book, Thrawn, Heir and the increasing unwieldiness of Legends.

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J.J. Abrams: Starting Episode IX is “bittersweet”

J.J. Abrams posted his first tweet to his personal account to mark the first day of shooting on Episode IX. “Bittersweet starting this next chapter without Carrie, but thanks to an extraordinary cast and crew, we are ready to go.” he tweeted. “Grateful for @rianjohnson and special thanks to George Lucas for creating this incredible world and beginning a story of which we are lucky to be a part. #IX”

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Flashback: Our first official looks at The Force Awakens

With Episode IX due to begin filming on August 1, let’s take a look back at our first official dispatches from the set of The Force Awakens. 

The clapperboard photo (#dayone) was tweeted by @bad_robot on May 16, 2014, while an official video for Omaze/Force for Change featuring director J.J. Abrams and the creature we now know as BobbaJo arrived on May 21.

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