Star Wars: Benioff Weiss Netflix deal raises questions about new trilogy
Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss recently signed a new five-year contract with Netfilx, which raises questions about their future in Star Wars.
Coming off of the back of the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, the show’s creators/show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were expected to begin production on a new trilogy of Star Wars movies.
Following the release of The Rise of Skywalker this coming December, Disney was expected to take a hiatus from releasing new Star Wars films until 2022, with the first entry of the Benioff-Weiss trilogy expected to be released then, and its sequels to be released in 2024 and 2026.
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Personally, I was a big Game of Throne fan, and despite many fans being unsatisfied with the show’s conclusion, I was excited when I first learned they would be joining the franchise, and was curious at what they could bring to the Star Wars universe.
Despite their commitment to create this new trilogy, it was recently reported Benioff and Weiss have signed a five-year $300-million contract with Netflix to write, produce and direct several new series and films for the streaming service.
This new contract with Netflix puts their future with the Star Wars franchise into question, as such a long and expensive contract with a separate company could surely be a conflict with three movies for a high-profile movie franchise.
HBO already announced that as a result of this deal, it was canceling their alternate history Confederate series, which Benioff and Weiss were set to produce, meaning their future with Star Wars may no longer be a lock.
The Deadline article that reported this deal directly addresses this issue, stating:
"They have several obligations they intend to fulfill. They are creating, writing and producing one of the next Star Wars trilogies (Rian Johnson is doing his own, with others in the works), they wrote for Universal a Kurt Cobain project, and are posed to adapt the prison break tale Dirty White Boys for Fox/Disney."
That note that Rian Johnson is producing his own trilogy is an interesting one to be included in this article. Of all of their upcoming projects mentioned, Star Wars is the largest by far, but as previously mentioned, Disney is only expected to release one trilogy from 2022 to 2026.
While it does say the pair intends to fulfill their obligation to produce a trilogy, it does not confirm when.
Since there are seven years between now and the conclusion of that trilogy, it is possible that Rian Johnson could produce his own Star Wars trilogy first, and that Benioff and Weiss’ trilogy will be delayed until after their deal with Netflix concludes.
Seeing as their new contract with Netflix is reportedly a five-year deal, if it were to begin next year in 2020, it would conclude in 2025 before the third film of the new Star Wars trilogy is released, meaning they would be free to develop their own to be released sometime after.
This course of action would make sense, as I doubt Netflix would spend so much money to hire Benioff and Weiss just for their focus to be divided to produce a blockbuster movie franchise for another studio, and the two would still honor their commitment to Lucasfilm down the line.
If this is in fact the case, it is still unknown when the second trilogy of films would take place, as Disney has yet to announce any new Star Wars projects passed the year 2026.
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What do you think of the news and the future of the franchise?