It was announced today that Benioff and Weiss, creators of the smash-hit, Emmy Award-winning television series Game of Thrones, will write and produce a new series of Star Wars films.
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David and Dan are some of the best storytellers working today,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm. “Their command of complex characters, depth of story and richness of mythology will break new ground and boldly push Star Wars in ways I find incredibly exciting.”
Yeah, that’s because Game of Thrones was actually written by George RR Martin. Nothing against these directors and that’s fine if Disney want them to write and produce new SW movies but give proper credit where it is due.
Game of Thrones’s success on TV is from Martin’s story and characters which these directors have done a great job in transitioning them to a TV series. But it’s pretty clear to me that the story and character quality started dropping of to a large degree when they started significantly diverging from the books in later series and then continuing to write the full story themselves after they passed where the books were up to.
Hearing about these two writing new SW movies doesn’t give me any additional confidence over other directors/writers that I’m not familiar with outside of that one piece of work, confidence in the new SW movies themselves being great with good stories and characters just because they had great books to directly reference for what they are now getting acclaim for. It’s just Disney doing their usual marketing thing by linking to their prior success of which the best parts are actually derived from someone else’s work…
Val
Edit: fixed my post to say “producing and writing” instead of “directing”.