Safety Not Guaranteed was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, so I’ve been on edge about this from day one. That review excerpt that Alderaan posted for Book of Henry honestly made me morbidly curious, though.
Yeah, quite a few people liked it but I just couldn’t stand the interminable romance or the ending.
The third film in a trilogy is always the hardest to get right, so why Disney seems intent on shooting themselves in the kidney before they even start is beyond me.
After he finishes Ready Player One, Spielberg should just do Episode IX before going into Indiana Jones 5. Or since that franchise is already toast, just skip that and go right into Robopocalypse.
It would be an oh so fitting way of closing off the saga (for now, anyway) since Spielberg would have directed RotJ.
That said, I don’t think they’d switch directors now. Book of Henry is Super 8 if Abrams already knew he was about to make a Star Wars movie and someone else was directing Into Darkness. The reviews and the box office seem rather inconsequential, and there aren’t any bad behind the scenes stories with this director like, say, Trank on Fant4stic.
What was weird to me was how the announcement of Trevorrow for IX seemed to come without any fanfare whatsoever, like it was just perfunctory. “Oh, the guy who made that Jurassic Park movie that just made a bajillion dollars for some reason? okay.”
When they announced Abrams for VII - even though they went with the most obvious possible choice - it was still a big deal, and I was ecstatic when they announced Johnson for VIII.
I actually liked Safety Not Gauranteed, but part of its charm is that it is such a small movie. When he was hired for Jurassic Park 4, someone pointed out that it must have been some kind of record for the biggest jump in budget sizes between a director’s first and second films.
Johnson feels like the happy medium between Abrams and Trevorrow in that respect, since he started small with Brick but his budgets only gradually increased with his next two films, and he’s done some solid tv work in the meantime.
I’d be curious to know what series of events led to Trevorrow’s hiring. Jurassic World had more than a couple connections to Kennedy (a franchise she’d produced and which her husband is still a producer on) and it feels like a repeat of Abrams getting recommended by Spielberg for Episode VII after turning it down. I wonder if that didn’t happen all over again with IX (them going after Spielberg and him having yet another person to recommend).
I feel like we still don’t quite know the full story behind what led to Abrams. Brad Bird fits into the equation somewhere, and Ben Affleck was actually on the shortlist. I’m also wondering if the Matthew Vaughn rumor was ever true.
It’s Rian Johnson’s story I’m the most curious about. With Abrams and Trevorrow it felt like Kennedy was listening to her colleagues. With Johnson it feels like she was listening to the internet.