The ‘Star Wars’ Spinoff Movies Will Be “Origin Story Films”

From slashfilm Fans have spent so much time focusing on what’s going to happen with J.J. Abrams’Star Wars Episode VII, we’ve all but ignored the 2016 Star Wars film. Not Episode VIII mind you — that’ll likely be in 2017. In 2016, we’ll get a Star Wars spinoff movie,written and produced by either Lawrence Kasdan or Simon Kinberg. Each writer is working on a film that’ll focus on a specific Star Wars character; we’ve known these spin-off movies are meant to be released between episodes of the new trilogy. Possible characters rumored for these films are Yoda, Han Solo or Boba Fett.

If that’s true though, which stories will we see on screen? At a recent Disney investor conference, chief financial officer Jay Rasulo referred to those movies not as “spin-offs,” but as “origin story films.”

The quote came from a story in Variety.

Seeing the “origin” of these characters was obviously the safe bet in the spin-off film guessing game. But to hear a high ranking Disney executive talk about it, things become a bit more clear.

In terms of Boba Fett, we know his father was Jango Fett and he did a little bounty hunting with him as a child. But after Mace Windu killed Jango, we have no idea how the young man grew up with the skills to hunt down bounties.

Yoda died on Dagobah at the age of 900. We saw him in his prime a few decades earlier as the leader of the Jedi Council, but how did this little green man become such a powerful Jedi? There’s about 850 years to cover.

And Han Solo’s past is regularly teased in the films, but details are spare. Outside of Chewbacca owing him a life debt, and Han owing a huge money debt to Jabba, little even been stated. All of these now become possible stories for movies we’ll see in 2016 and 2018.