Jason also learned that the new Battlefront game will span the entire saga – including some post-Return of the Jedi stuff. (“Lucasfilm has a lot of plans for that era.” Damn right they do.) The final section of the game will involve a battle early on in The Force Awakens. The game is apparently due to drop only a month before the movie’s release… It’ll be interesting to see if it actually makes that window.
I don’t agree with ether of them entirely (okay, I really don’t agree with Lussier and, full disclosure, went a-ranting on Twitter this morning over it) but there’s something kind of funny about all this: The old arguments never die, do they?
When I heard that J.J. Abrams was at the VES awards last night, I wasn’t expecting much more than the standard boilerplate quotes. But he spoke to Collider on the red carpet, discussing the broadsaber (and the “many contradictory emails” he’s received about it,) IMAX, CGI, and more. Watch the video, or head over to Collider for the most pertinent quotes.
The basics, though: They’re still putting together the first cut of the film, he’ll be executive producing VIII and IX, there will still be “an enormous amount of CG effects,” (duh) and the broadsaber “was not done without a lot of conversation and it’s fun to see people have the conversation that we had, but in reverse.” None of these are huge revelations (we’ve known that only one scene is in IMAX for months,) but considering how little we’ve had out of Abrams overall, this is a bonanza.
Mark Hamill on Kingsman, Flash, and new Star Wars. “It’s exciting from the standpoint that it’s the first of the movies in that universe that’s conceived and directed by the fan generation,” he tells the L.A. Times.
I’ve been mired in snow and work and other non-fun things this week, but Making Star Wars has been keeping busy with The Force Awakens this week, dropping some of the bigger rumors we’ve seen lately. A new source has given Jason a bunch of stuff about some of the main cast. He’s pretty sure of at least some of it, but on the whole I feel it seems a little too close to the few ‘original’ bits of the 4Chan/Redditrumors of a few months back for me to buy it completely.
For the Episode VII pessimists, Jason has some supposed details from another source, and that everyone involved may not be as gung-ho on the new movie as we’ve been hearing. Gasp!
→ Billie Lourd has found herself another acting gig, and the E! article about it has dredged up that old rumor about who exactly she’s playing in The Force Awakens. Inside info, or just something they’ve heard around the internets?
→ MAD Magazine is already spoofing The Force Awakens. Okay, maybe not for the first time.
Per Courthouse News Service, Lucasfilm has filed a subpoena request against ImageShack, where user “Darth_Simi” has posted a gallery of leaked photos and supposed concept art.
Interestingly, Simi’s gallery does not seem to be the source of many of the images – they’ve also posted the set shots from TMZ, Greenham Commons aerial shots, the set shot from the Abu Dhabi newspaper plus cast paparazzi and red carpet pics from sources like Getty. (And didn’t the biggest batch of concept leaks actually come from millenniumfalcon.com?)
An image explicitly mentioned in the filing, which was our first look at the broadsaber that we saw in the teaser trailer, actually originates with and is watermarked by Star Wars Underworld, who has since removed it. There are other leaks that they could pursue as well without verifying them, such as the stormtrooper helmets.
However, Simi’s gallery is one of the most complete ones I’ve seen in terms of the various photo leaks, so I can see why Lucasfilm would want it gone, even if it is ‘just’ a collection. It’s practically a (visual) one-stop spoiler shop.
I’m not at all familiar with CNS as a news source, but if there’s any truth to this, I expect we’ll be seeing a lot less leaked art from here on out. Maybe that’s the point of the whole endeavor – not to take out the actual leakers, just to scare them enough that they don’t do it again. Say what you will about a site like Making Star Wars that’s generally only describing stuff, but it would take one a LONG time to go through all of what Jason and company have posted – far longer than an image gallery. (via)
Jason at Making Star Wars has seen a yet-unreleased publicity picture of Han, Leia and Chewbacca. Yes, Leia! It’s a January miracle.
→ In a Disney shareholder meeting, Bob Iger praised Episode VII (why wouldn’t he?) and reiterates that we can expect VIII in 2017, IX in 2019, and hints that there may be more Episodes after this. (Which, to be fair, we’ve known since the start. None of this is really new information, people are just treating it like it is.) /Film unpacks the statement, and while I think they’re reaching at parts (“these characters” to me reads more Star Wars in general than just the new folks) the analysis is pretty sound.
→ Oscar Isaac revealed to HuffPostUK how J.J. Abrams reacted to Harrison Ford’s leg injury, which kind of makes it sound like Ford slipped the guy some of the good drugs, honestly.
→ Latino Review says we’ll see practical versions of a familiar alien, which will likely be reused for the spin-off.