Some big news has broke today, as Disney CEO Bob Iger announced during a shareholders meeting that the title of the first standalone “Star Wars” movie, actress Felicity Jones being cast in the film, and finally that Rian Johnson will write and direct Episode VIII!
The titled of the first standalone film will be “Rouge One,” and is a story that comes from long time ILM visual effects supervisor and chief creative officer John Knoll, who will also serve as Executive Producer for the the film along with Simon Emanuel, and Jason McGatlin. Kathleen Kennedy and Tony To will produce and John Swartz will co-produce.
Though we all knew Rian Johnson will be writing and directing Episode VIII for a while now, we now finally have a release date for the film, as “Star Wars” returns to a summer release when Episode VIII hits theaters on May 26th, 2017! Kathleen Kennedy and Ram Bergman will be the producers for Episode VIII.
It’s definitely great to have a title for the first standalone film, and it being titled “Rouge One” is sure to to be the topic of much speculation in the coming weeks as to what the film will actually be about. We’ll see if more information about “Rogue One” will be revealed at Celebration Anaheim, which is now just a little over a month away!
You can check out the full announcement about all this great news over at StarWars.com