I’ll admit my biases up front. When it came to the Lord of the Rings films, I was more interested in these being the new pictures by Peter Jackson than adaptations of Tolkien’s books. I read The Fellowship when I was a teenager and it just never grabbed me in the same way as Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Bad Taste or Dead Alive (aka Braindead, here in the UK).
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And so it is with Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII. Okay, not nearly as much. I rather like Empire, I’m fond of the two films that sandwiched it, and I even had a good time with bits of the prequels. None of that, though, compares to how I feel about Johnson’s Brick, The Brothers Bloom and Looper. Those are the benchmarks I want him to beat here, and if he’s got Lucasfilm and Disney helping him do so, then great.
Mark Ruffalo was one of those Brothers Bloom, and while he hasn’t worked with Johnson since, he says he’d been keen on a reunion. Speaking with Collider, Ruffalo tried to remember an e-mail he recently sent to Johnson. It went something like this:
Rian, congratulations on everything you’ve been doing. And by the way, if there’s a part in Star Wars, please, anything, please consider considering me to join you.
I’m sure the real thing wasn’t quite so to-the-point, if it even really exists. The point stands, though: Ruffalo would like to be in Star Wars, and his prior working relationship with Johnson might just give him an in.
Johnson is labouring on Episode VIII now, presumably writing a screenplay. There’s no official release date, but I still have just a little hunch that they’ll revert to May dates after Episode VII. That would make it May 2018, where there’s already a Marvel movie on the docket. Seems risky, and it’s just a hunch… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
