Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
While the music in the latest trailer for The Force Awakens obviously uses John Williams’ original work from the previous Star Wars installments, it’s not a newly composed track from the composer, as many of us originally assumed. /Film digs in a little and comes up with a few names.
Below, a version of the trailer music with the distracting volume fluctuations for dialouge normalized. (via)
If you want some analysis on the trailer as a marketing move, Devin Faraci at Birth Movies Death has it down: “What we’re seeing is a major blockbuster hitting the standard checkpoints of movie marketing with great reluctance.”
→ Meredith Woerner at the L.A. Times has pieced together stuff from the trailers with convention-season cast interviews and is, if nothing else, a good refresher for those who aren’t spending 99% of their time in “the bubble.”
→ In China, the trailer debuted on the Great Wall, because why not.
→ All The Force Awakens trailer numbers you may need.
→ AMC will be giving out a cool poster to folks who go see the film in IMAX 3D.
→ Relevant! There’s a new interview with Pablo Hidalgo (plus Dave Filoni, Shelly Shapiro, Chuck Wendig and Kieron Gillen) about Lucasfilm’s Story Group.
→ Spoilers! Someone let slip some interesting info on Pip Anderson’s character to the Making Star Wars folks last night.
→ There’s a music-only version of the trailer. On that note, Ali Arikan at Slate writes about the brand-new John Williams score.
Sony Classical is reissuing three new collector’s sets of John Williams’ iconic Star Wars soundtracks in January, in vinyl, CD and high-definition download. They’ll be available January 8, 2016.
StarWars.com has announced that John William’s soundtrack for The Force Awakens will drop the same day the movie does – December 18.
This doesn’t mean they won’t pull a ‘Qui-Gon’s Noble End’ on us – it’s highly likely we’ll get packaging leaks well ahead of time. (If not an actual, official track release.) But it’s also worth noting that they managed to avoid spoilers with the Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith soundtracks, so save your concern trolling for other matters.
In official official news, Lucasfilm has teamed with HP for a fan art competition, Art Awakens. Tumblr has been training for this!
→ With Entertainment Weekly, J.J. Abrams reiterated that we won’t get a new The Force Awakens trailer at D23, or at all until fall. There’ll be no TFA footage at all, “behind the scenes or otherwise,” he said. Of course, that doesn’t mean we won’t get something, like another character reveal or a new poster. (Not to mention things regarding the Parks…) And I’d bet actual money is still that we’ll get something for Rogue One.
→ The Force Awakens scoring sessions are “beyond anything I have experienced musically in my life,” a source tells the John Williams Fan Network.
→ More juice for the theory/hope that Episode VIII will return to film on Skellig Michael at The Star.
→ I won’t be tracking every TFA merchandise leak this month, but here are a few interesting ones: A Micro Machines Millennium Falcon playset, Black Series Finn, Chewbacca and < href="https://twitter.com/Sompeetalay/status/630494610574458880">Kylo Ren and Funko Pop Vinyl figures. My favorite, though, is a lunch bag with some new-to-us Captain Phasma art, which I love because even though she is 100% in armor, the way she’s standing is badass yet makes it absolutely clear that the character is a woman. Men don’t stand like that!
Making Star Wars has some info from the John Williams scoring sessions. There are some references to rumors/possible spoilers at the link, but according to what Jason has heard the music “is brilliant so far” and “Williams has topped himself.”
→ Mark Hamill did the narration at the cast read-through, Peter Mayhew said at Star Wars Weekends.
→ An interview with Adam Driver’s stunt double, Gyula Tóth has been floating around.
→ Spoiler corner: Back to MSW, this time for some rumors on the Resistance and a sequence leading up to a major battle.
Journey to The Force Awakens: Revealed at BookCon this weekend, thanks to via The Wookiee Gunner: Shattered Empire will be bi-weekly – two comics in September, two in November.
The first issue will be out September 2, and the trade paperback collection on November 17 – at least at the moment. (I doubt they’ll deviate much, but they are comics and September is a long way off.)
→ The Force Awakens is FINALLY on the cover of Star Wars Insider.
→ Word on the street (aka Scoring Sessions) says that John Williams has started scoring. Just as rumored!
→ Making Star Wars has a small grab-bag of rumors from the licensees, though the two main ones actually seem a little more relevant to Episode VIII than The Force Awakens. (Also, one of them made me SUPER EXCITED. But, uh, possible spoilers!)
So how does BB-8 work? One site has a guess – though warning, it slowed down every computer I looked at it on.
→ Making Star Wars has heard that John Williams will begin recording The Force Awakens score next month.
→ Our first glimpse of what is assumed to be Kylo Ren’s personal ship – or at the very least, a ship we may see briefly in the second trailer – comes from LEGO. Because of course it does.
→ Miltos Yerolemou talked a little bit about filming TFA with Asian Correspondent. “It’s not really a job where you ask any questions,” he said. (Also, I believe this may be as close as we get to an actual confirmation?)
→ Spoiler corner: Rey gets a gift and a very small cameo from the original trilogy.
→ Looking ahead: Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII notebooks. Keep reading the string for some of his process.
Red alert! Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo is in Vanity Fair! We knew him when, y’all. Okay, they also have John Williams talking about The Force Awakens score, but: Pablo! He gives another fab quote on the Legends situation:
…there are great stories told there, but in all honesty they were written in an era where there was no expectation that we were going to add new movies or cinematic content onto that. So they blazed new trails there without the benefit of that knowledge, and they told really cool and compelling stories, but it’s not necessarily the stories that we want to tell on-screen.
→ Someone else got a super-vague quote from Oscar Isaac about Star Wars, this time the improbably named Monkeys Fighting Robots. (Says the woman who runs a site that sounds like it probably hosts porn.)
→ Do you want a (possible) synopsis of The Force Awakens based on all the Making Star Wars rumors? Do you? Because MSW has that for you. Click or not, it’s all you.
The big news today is StarWars.com confirming that John Williams will be recording The Force Awakens score in Los Angeles, the first time a Star Wars score has been recorded in the U.S.
But I’ve been sitting on a few other things, so:
→ There was some scuttlebutt about how Oscar Isaac said he would be excited to work with Episode VIII director Rian Johnson, and (of course) the internet jumped on that as proof his character survives Episode VII. Now, I’d be very surprised if Poe Dameron kicks it that early, seeing as we suspect – with very heavy assistance from the trailer – that he’s one of the new Big 3. But for what it’s worth, /Film sought a clarification from him, and there’s your lesson in making hay out of Star Wars news for the week.
→ And now the rumors/spoilers: Making Star Wars had pieces on Kylo Ren and his connection to some earlier concept art, some stuff on Poe Dameron and Finn from early in the film, plus a look how things fit together from there. Then there’s some concept art of Ren and how it may connect to ‘Captain Phasma.’