Last week, the story going around was that Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy had asked Disney to push the release date for Star Wars Episode VII back to 2016, to give them more time to, you know, finish writing it and stuff. Disney patted her on the head and told her she was adorable, and this week announced that the official Star Wars Episode VII release date would be December 18th, 2015. One can speculate that they probably wanted it for a summer 2015 release (all other Star Wars films have been released in May), but pushed it to Christmas as a quasi-compromise.
Now Disney Chief Bob Iger has official comment on the matter, and it’s a masterpiece of corporate dickhead newspeak.
“One of the things that was very important to us is that we give the creative team, J.J. Abrams and his writing team, the time to design, write and produce the film so that we can optimize quality, so they can create a great film,” Iger stated to Bloomberg.
“We really hoped this release date would allow us to optimize goodness, while minimizing the broadest plurality of suckage contingencies, by growing the writer’s timetable horizontally to allow them even greater disruptive whitespace ideation opportunities.”
“At one point we considered the summer of 2015, but it felt like with the changes we made in the writing team that that was going to create a bit of a rush, and we didn’t think that was optimal, for obvious reasons,” Iger stated. “So Christmas 2015 became the date. [It] happens to be the date which ‘Avatar‘ — which is the number one movie of all time — was released, so we like that. Certainly, hopefully that will bring some good luck even though that was not our film. And Christmas is a good time for a film like ‘Star Wars’ we think, which will have obvious interest for young people and old people alike.” [ThePlaylist]
Yes, you wanted to give the writer’s more time to write the movie you hope to release so you made the release date six months later. I think I’m starting to understand now. But I look forward to a three-hour TED talk on this subject, to really get into all the ins, and outs, and what-have-yous.