With the acquisition of Lucasfilms by Disney for $4.05 billion and the news that there will be three new Star Wars episodes, the hunt had already started for the man or women to pen the script, since George Lucas seems to be fogging in and out of retirement.
Michael Arndt, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine, has been set the task of scripting the next Star Wars episode. Lucasfilm’s revealed the new script-writer a few days ago and we’ve learnt that Arndt was already penning the next plot before getting signed on.
With such a brilliant performance on the last Toy Story, (unless we see a diabolical milking by Pixar) Arndt has had experience with presenting blockbuster scripts and we see this move as one that can only enhance his career resume. The question is can he connect with the Star Wars fans the way Lucas and those before him did.
George Lucas was given a huge amount of stick by big fans of the original Star Wars before the movies became a huge phenomenon and swept the world. It is, to this day, one of the best-selling movie series in history, sitting just behind Bond and Harry Potter.
This may change with the three new episodes planned by Disney, although we doubt we have seen the last of Bond either. In any case, Star Wars still has that big movie audience, as we seen the with the last episode, III: Revenge of the Sith in 2005, hitting around $850 million at the box office.
Michael Arndt will stay in communications with George Lucas, now creative consultant for Disney. As we’ve seen in the history of Star Wars, Lucas has a bad problem with trying to do everything himself; this time, he hasn’t got that dominance of a movie industry to keep his pen on the paper.