Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
Entertainment Weekly has our first official look at The Force Awakens toys, but they’re all stormtrooper-themed, so it feels a little underwhelming. (One of them, Hasbro’s Black Series 6″ stormtrooper above, has already shown up on eBay – and as it’s the SDCC exclusive, expect it to show up again.) Wake me up when we get the details on that remote-controlled BB-8.
There will be a Hall H panel for The Force Awakens at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, July 10, StarWars.com revealed today. Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan and “special guests” will be present.
There are several other panels, including two for Star Wars publishing. (Del Rey will be at ‘Part 2,’ Friday at 11 a.m.)
Will we see the Skellig Michael location in Episode VIII? The Irish Times says a production team visited the island recently. At least two actors were present for the Episode VII filming there last July, and if one believes the plot rumors it seems likely that the location could reoccur. (Or there’s always Rogue One, I suppose.)
Meanwhile, Jedi News is saying that The Force Awakens also filmed in Scotland, though not with actors.
→ Also appearing in the latest issue of Interview magazine (Domhnall Gleeson is one of the cover models) is Billie Lourd, who denies that she’s playing Leia’s daughter, not that that was ever rumored, but hey, it’s not like we get a ton of denials these days.
We already know that Alan Dean Foster’s The Force Awakens novelization will out first in eBook on the same the day movie comes out – December 18 – but we now have an exact date for the hardcover version: January 5. (via)
→ Some slight cosmetic changes to Threepio for The Force Awakens, if a Mexican soda can is to be believed. (Honestly, I wouldn’t place any bets on this one – it looks more like a coloring error than anything else, but stranger things, etc.) Also on MSW, The Force Awakens LEGO set names don’t really shed much light on anything.
→ Both Adam Driver and Domhnall Gleeson had some things to say about Star Wars recently.
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!)
Another news cycle, another silly Star Wars name! And of course, BB-8 is already causing trouble, we pondered how many Furiosas Andy Serkis is channeling, drafts are turned in, Elsa takes down a squad or two, and a lot about printers for some reason.
Continue reading “Orange card: Best #StarWars, #TheForceAwakens and #SWEU tweets for May 13-28”
StarWars.com has an interview with Annie Leibovitz today about her Star Wars work for Vanity Fair. There’s a photo of Andy Serkis in mo-cap gear, and the reveal that his character is Supreme Leader Snoke.
Snoke! Granted, it’s no Sheev, but aren’t we glad I didn’t do the Twitter roundup last night?
→ The first actual The Force Awakens action figures have been spotted – on eBay, naturally. It’s a stormtrooper.
→ Spoiler corner: Finn and his hot new accessory.
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.
There’s some great stuff from Lucasfilm head honcho Kathleen Kennedy at Vanity Fair today.
George made it personal. He just made a movie that meant something to him. And I think that’s probably the biggest challenge for anybody stepping into this is that they can’t spend a lot of time thinking about what other people are going to think of the movie. They have to come at it from the point of view of, What does this mean to me and what does it have to do with me? Frankly, I don’t think great movies ever get made unless there’s some aspect of that going on between the creator and the story that’s being told. It can only become emotional [for an audience] if it’s operating on some kind of personal passion.
She also the emotional resonance of Star Wars, the old school experience, and how she and Steven Spielberg ended up hiring J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) to fix up those old Super 8 films.