While absolutely nothing is going to top that Patton Oswalt video from Parks and Rec in terms of Star Wars-related awesomeness, there is some actual Star Wars news to discuss today and I guess you could say that it’s pretty big. According to the Disney bros who spoke at CinemaCon today in Las Vegas, once Star Wars: Episode VII is released in 2015, there will be a new film from the franchise every year after that.

I assume that includes the little-talked-about spin-off, National Lampoon’s Camp Jedi: Episode Sithty-Nine. So how is the House of Mouse going to break the new films down?

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After Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull everyone was down on my main man, Harri-Fo. Not so fast suckers, because El Mayimbe (Spanish for “The Mayimbe”) broke the news today that Ford will return for Star Wars VII. What?! Shiver me timbers and call me Sally the Southern Biscuit, this news has the “Warsians” (why do they call themselves such a weird name?) all in a lather.

Slate has cautioned this might be false info, but they are correct about The Mayimbe’s general veracity. I drank once with that dude and he seemed pretty legit to me. He didn’t order a flavored vodka or anything like that.

There’s not much more to say other than to note that both R2-D2 and C-3PO passed on the project out of “respect for the original work” and “not wanting to be an easy target for South Park“.

According to a report by The Wrap, Super 8/Star Trek director JJ Abrams is set to take on Star Wars Episode VII for the newly Disney-acquired incarnation of Lucasfilm. With JJ Abrams involved, my level of interest in this project has been officially raised from *shrug* to Code Mouthfart.

Haha, something something lens flares.

Lucasfilm Chief Kathleen Kennedy has been courting Abrams, one of the most successful directors and producers in Hollywood — and a man beloved by fanboys. He runs one of the industry’s top production companies, Bad Robot, and created or co-created television franchises like “Lost,” “Fringe” and “Alias.” He has also directed film spectacles “Mission: Impossible III,” “Star Trek” and “Super 8.”

The lure of the Jedi was too strong, and it will no doubt complicate his relationship with Paramount, where Bad Robot is a top supplier. Abrams has been feverishly working on “Star Trek Into Darkness,” his second Star Trek film since he rebooted the franchise in 2009. “Into Darkness,” still in post-production, opens May 18.

The same guy is directing both Star Wars and Star Trek, shouldn’t that be illegal? I bet some 35-year-old virgins are none to happy about this. Not me though, I get tons of pussy. I have this really hot girlfriend, she goes to Stanford.

I’d like to see a very special Episode of Star Wars, where Han Solo goes to a Take Back The Night rally.

If you thought you were going to be guy to finally make your Star Wars fan-fic dreams a sort of reality, tough luck, Hoss. Turns out Disney had a guy on it before they even said they were making another Star Wars (probably a wise strategy).

Insiders confirm that Arndt has written a 40- to 50-page treatment for the film and is likely to be at least one of the writers when the Disney/Lucasfilm project begins shooting in 2014.
Sources also tell Vulture that the studio’s brass want to bring back the three central characters of the original Star Wars: a much older Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo.
Arndt’s 40-something page treatment will soon be crossing the desks of top directors, including Brad Bird, Steven Spielberg (the former producing partner of Lucasfilm co-chair Kathleen Kennedy), and J.J. Abrams.

Spielberg has already said he won’t direct, so don’t expect to witness the galactic rebellion through the innocent eyes of a gentle Tauntaun. And in case anyone’s asking (and apparently they are), Tarantino is also out.

Since winning the Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, Arndt has lectured extensively on the art of storytelling at numerous writers’ retreats, like the Hawaii Writers Conference in Maui and the Austin Film Festival, always featuring a lengthy and detailed explanation of why the original Star Wars’ ending is so creatively satisfying.

At these talks, Arndt always tells attendees that Star Wars’ enduring appeal has to do with resolving its protagonists goals’ nearly simultaneously, at the climax of the movie. In the comments section of a discussion about a Star Wars talk Arndt gave at the Austin Film Festival in 2010, one attendee of the seminar notes, “Arndt stated that if a writer could resolve the story’s arcs (internal, external, philosophical) immediately after the Moment of Despair at the climax, he or she would deliver the Insanely Great Ending and put the audience in a euphoric state. The faster it could happen, the better. By [Arndt’s] reckoning, George Lucas hit those three marks at the climax of Star Wars within a space of 22 seconds.”

Yikes. I know that’s a second-hand account, but that was very Robert McKee. It always scares me when people try to fit qualitative emotional states into labeled boxes like an autistic kid trying to grasp emotions. It reminds me of Mystery from The Pick-Up Artist, who would describe getting to second base something like… “Well look, if she’s been giving you IOIs all night and you’re DHV success number is over 65, it’s time to kino-escalate.” Always odd when people turn life into instructions for building a desk from IKEA. But hey, the guy wrote Toy Story 3, which was unarguably amazing, so whatever works. You can drink your own piss from pickle jars labeled “story arc ,” “redemption,” and “catharsis” for all I care. Hell, I’m gonna go do that right now, just because.

By far the worst thing about the announcement that Disney was acquiring LucasFilm and planning a Star Wars Episode VII was knowing that it would mean probably five years of fact-free Star Wars speculation. So get excited for that. (*puts together 50-page slideshow of ‘EPISODE VII PLOTS WE’D LIKE TO SEE’, counts money*)

Today’s non-story? Harrison Ford would be “open” to returning as Han Solo. In other words, Harrison Ford is not allergic to money.

“Harrison is open to the idea of doing the movie and he’s upbeat about it, all three of them are,” said one highly placed source, referring to Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher, the trio that made a hyper-speed jump to global fame on May 25, 1977, the opening night for George Lucas’s original Star Wars film.

Who is this “highly-placed” source who happens to be BFFs with Ford, Hammill, and Carrie Fisher? Somehow I doubt those three are partying together on the weekends. Meanwhile, as even EW’s Geoff Boucher who broke the story, is quick to point out, Harrison Ford has long seemed not all that thrilled about Star Wars.

The actor, now 70, is plenty proud of Indy, Jack Ryan, John Book, and Dr. Richard Kimble but in the past he didn’t disguise his disdain for Solo. “As a character he was not so interesting to me,” the frosty Ford explained in an ABC interview in 2010.
As Ford told ABC in the same interview: “I thought he should have died in the last one to give it some bottom…George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.” [...]
In the 29 years since the red carpet premiere of Return of the Jedi, Ford has declined hundreds  – if not thousands — of offers to appear at Star Wars events and cast reunions even the ones sanctioned and run by Lucasfilm. In fact, in all those years was only one offer he accepted: He attended a 30th anniversary screening of the The Empire Strikes Back in 2010 to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
About 400 fans (including Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, Jon Favreau, and Kevin Feige) paid $100-$175 each to hear Ford reflect on his Millennium Falcon days. I was the moderator for the event and the star arrived in a cheery mood but, after watching the film, he was weary of the crowd’s zeal for something he could never love.
“I don’t know that I understood it very well,” Ford said in a flat tone of the franchise’s ascension in popular culture. “I’m not sure I understand it yet…I was very happy to be involved. I was pleased to be a part of an ensemble.” [EntertainmentWeekly]

Back in 2010, Movieline even ran a piece called “Harrison Ford’s Long History of Hating Star Wars.”

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