Either way, pretty ridiculous to call this mundane news.
The ‘he’s creating the other two as well’ part really is that. Unless they’ll really bow down to him and let him loose completely unrestricted exactly the way you wouldn’t have done with a studio tentpole, with enough time between the installments to have him personally make the whole thing… that bit is pretty meaningless, especially this far in advance.
I am still absolutely beside myself that he’s doing a new, original Star Wars story.
I thought you meant mundane in regards to the news as a whole, not just that one bit.
Yeah, I highly doubt he’s directing or even writing the other two. But I think it would be odd for them to announce a spin-off trilogy if he didn’t have a three-part story in mind. Again, they could ultimately ditch his ideas, and whether they do or not who knows, but at this point that doesn’t really matter. It’s envisioned as a Johnson overseen trilogy, whether that remains the case doesn’t change the fact that that’s the idea now.
Yeah, it didn’t come out very clear. Announcing a trilogy is technically bigger than announcing a single movie, sure, but it’s really the same thing if you’re framing it as RJ’s project when pretty much everything after the intitial movie is subject to change the instant they hire a writer to adapt Johnson’s treatment/idea into a script - and with how LucasFilm treats directors you’ve got that hurdle to get over as well.
Unless I’m overly cynical, and the next announcement will be that he’s writing and directing all three, and that it’ll run parallel to the next sequel trilogy as well as to the rest of SW strip-mining. They wanted to up the movie count for some time now - this could be a move towards that.