I was hoping - perhaps naively - that Ep7 would be made at the same pace as the original film, which started shooting in March of '76 and was in theaters just fourteen months later.
Abrams started shooting Into Darkness just sixteen months before its release, but we keep hearing about a Spring start date for production, so maybe fourteen months was a stretch.
I think if we had it our way, Abrams and Kasdan would continue to work on the script for one more year, principal photography wouldn't start until March of '15, and Disney would release it in theaters May of 2016.
Oh, and they'd let 20th Century Fox release it in theaters purely for nostalgia ;)
Honestly, the December release is probably due more to lack of competition at the Box Office than anything else. Summer of 2015 will be a much different beast than 1999. The World of Warcraft movie is also scheduled for December 18, but Universal will probably push it back to March now that they'd be going up against Star Wars.
It's important to remember that Disney didn't just buy Lucasfilm so they could make money. They did it so they could make a whole shit-ton of money. Putting it out in a December landscape where they could clean up at the box office well into the winter months always made more sense than competing in a summer arena filled with the other studios' prized fighters. That's already gonna be a bloodbath without throwing Ep7 into the fray.
Considering the budget on this thing will probably be big (200 million just seems to be the expected norm these days for a movie like this), and that Bob Iger has been promising a 2015 release over and over again, a summer 2016 release was probably never gonna happen.
Hey, we're looking at a roughly year-and-a-half schedule from the start of production to release. That's still a signifigantly tighter schedule than on the prequels, which filmed two whole years ahead of release since every shot was gonna have some kind of visual effect. Also, Episode VIII will probably be a summer release since I'm pretty sure the Avatar sequels are squatting December for the next three years after that.
