(Lucasfilm)
Just a little over a week after the release of the Star Wars: The Last Jedi teaser trailer, Disney and Lucasfilm are already looking to the future. The studios announced the release date for Colin Treverrow’s Star Wars: Episode IX and for Steven Spielberg’s fifth Indiana Jones movie.
Episode IX will hit theaters on May 24, 2019, making it the first of the the three films in the Star Wars sequel trilogy to hit theaters in May. The date is also a year after the untitled Young Han Solo movie opens on May 25, 2018.
Not much is known about IX, since we haven’t even seen The Last Jedi, which opens on December 15, 2017. We do know that the late Carrie Fisher will not actually be in IX, despite Todd Fisher’s comments to the New York Daily News. Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy confirmed to Good Morning America that we’ll see a lot of Fisher as General Leia in The Last Jedi, but she’s not going to be in IX.
EXCLUSIVE: Lucasfilm President Kathy Kennedy says Carrie Fisher will NOT be in @StarWars Episode 9 as General Leia. #SWCO #TheLastJedi
IX will be the end of the Skywalker saga, at least as far as we know now. The film’s story was written by The Last Jedi‘s Rian Johnson. Treverrow and his Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly wrote the script.
As for the Indiana Jones film, it will open on July 10, 2020, with Harrison Ford also returning to play the most famous fictional archaeologist ever created. That will be 12 years after the release of 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was already filled with jokes about Indy’s age when Ford was 65. How many jokes about old age will be in Indy 5, when Ford is 77?
The fifth Indy film will also be the first movie in the franchise made without Paramount Pictures’ participation. In 2013, Disney and Paramount reached a deal to make all the future Indy movies at the Mouse House and the fifth film was announced in March 2016. It was originally scheduled for summer 2019, but Spielberg took on other projects that came first. For example, he’s currently making a movie about the Pentagon Papers with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep that will hit theaters on December 22 to qualify for the 2018 Oscars.
These two title changes only scratched the surface of the release-date-juggling Disney performed today. The new The Lion King movie has been scheduled for July 19, 2019, A Wrinkle In Time was moved to March 9, 2018 and Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 was moved to November 21, 2018. The animated film Gigantic was delayed by two years and rescheduled for November 25, 2020. Frozen 2 will open on November 27, 2019.
Click here for a look at where IX fits on the Star Wars timeline:
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‘Star Wars: Episode IX,’ ‘Indiana Jones 5’ Get New Release Dates