Star Wars

Franchise filmmaking is a delicate high-wire act designed to make the most money possible, not to generate the best individual movie, and to that end it helps if the chosen directors can defer to the producers and powers that be. Nothing in Joe and Anthony Russo’s previous credits seemed to indicate that they should be directing Captain America movies. But that also meant there was no precedent for how they would approach them. The same is not true of Michael Mann, or Quentin Tarantino, or Steven Spielberg. It’s also not true of Christopher Nolan, and DC is still dealing with the ramifications of his Batman movies, which, virtuosic as they at times were, have proven incredibly hard to emulate. DC could be doomed to make karaoke versions of The Dark Knight until Superman and Batman have no more cities left to destroy. Imagine Sam Raimi getting Spider-Man in 2015. I doubt it.

But then, placed in charge of writing and directing Episode VIII and writing Episode IX, you have Rian Johnson — one of our best young American filmmakers, a writer-director who made Brick and Looper, two of the most innovative and unique genre subversions of the last decade. Here is a guy who makes weird, creative movies that play with and reinvent tropes rather than submit to them. He has yet to direct a movie he hasn’t also written, and Episode VIII will be the first in which he works with a preexisting concept. It was a shock when Disney tapped him.

But hiring Johnson suggests a straying from the blockbuster playbook followed by Marvel, DC, and so on. Working together, Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan turned Michael Arndt’s first draft of The Force Awakens into a successful reboot of the series. But that movie was a throat-clearing: It's larger purpose was to assure audiences that no one was going to make Star Wars about kids playing dress-up again. Abrams did establish the ground rules of the new Star Wars universe with Force Awakens — through Kylo Ren and Snoke, the First Order, Luke's reemergence, and Han's death — to ensure at least some narrative precedent. But Johnson has a tremendous amount of room to work within the larger Star Wars sequel trilogy.

Even if we take the most pessimistic view of Johnson's role, which would be that he's a details-man brought in to breathe life into Abrams's and Kathleen Kennedy's expanded-universe vision of forever-blossoming new properties, giving him the scripts for both VIII and IX is a tremendous vote of confidence in his talent for those details. But statements made by Kasdan at the beginning of December suggest a more nuanced reality. He told the Los Angeles Times, "These movies are going to be so different. Rian Johnson is a friend of mine — he's going to make some weird thing. If you've seen Rian's work, you know it's not going be like anything that's ever been in Star Wars." Then an even more resounding vote of confidence came from Abrams himself earlier this week, who, according to Force Awakens actor Greg Grunberg, said that Johnson's script for Episode VIII is so good that Abrams wishes he were the one directing it.