Last month, Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy indicated that the Star Wars franchise would be taking a break from feature films after the release of this December’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, in order to concentrate on the franchise’s television output for the upcoming Disney+ streaming service. Now we know when we will cinematically return to a galaxy far, far away.
Lucasfilm parent company Disney announced their theatrical film release schedule for the next several years today, revealing that the have plans to release a new Star Wars trilogy starting in 2022. The first installment will hit theaters on December 16, 2022, with the second and third arriving December 20, 2024 and December 18, 2026.
Currently Warner Brothers has their superhero sequel Aquaman 2 scheduled for December 16, 2022 as well, but the studio will most likely move to another date.
Since Disney bought Lucasfilm and relaunched Star Wars as a feature film concern, they have had phenomenal success with releasing the films in the December time frame, so it makes sense that they stay in that month going forward. The new trilogy will alternate release years with the four Avatar sequels that will be coming from recent Disney acquisition 20th Century Fox. Those films are set for release on December 17, 2021, December 22, 2023, December 19, 2025 and December 17, 2027.
Lucasfilm is currently developing two separate Star Wars trilogies – one from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and one from Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. There has been no official word as to what the storylines for either of these two trilogies may be, though it is rumored that the Benioff and Weiss one may be set in the time of the Old Republic, many thousands of years before the current films’ “Skywalker Saga.” It is unknown which trilogy will be going forward into production first.
