The next Star Wars film will come from Game of Thrones showrunners

Now we know for certain — the next Star Wars film coming in 2022 will be from the showrunners of Game of Thrones and not the new trilogy announced by Lucasfilm that’s being developed by The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson.

Disney Chairman and CEO Robert Iger dropped the news Tuesday morning during a Q&A at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit.

“We did a deal with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are famous for Game of Thrones, and the next movie we release will be theirs. We’re not saying anything more about that,” Iger told the crowd.

Last week, Disney announced it was taking a three-year break on feature films from the Star Wars franchise after the debut this December of J.J. Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker, which concludes the trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens — and also serves as a finale for the overall “Skywalker Saga” that began with the 1977 original.

The company confirmed that the next films would be released at two-year intervals in December of 2022, 2024, and 2026, but there was no word on whether those films would be from Benioff and Weiss or from Johnson. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has said the two teams would be consulting together on their projects, but they still appear to be separate trilogies.

Iger also teased that a third Star Wars TV series is in the works for the company’s Disney+ streaming service. When it debuts this November, Disney+ will include producer Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian series, about a masked gunfighter seeking a bounty in the lawless time after the events of Return of the Jedi. 

Another series overseen by The Americans producer Stephen Schiff will focus on Diego Luna’s Rebel spy Cassian Andor from Rogue One and his droid sidekick K-2S0 (Alan Tudyk.)

“My guess is there probably will be at least one more live-action series that we produce for Disney+, a Star Wars series, before we release the next film,” Iger said. “So we’re not doing nothing. I believe these TV series will be extremely popular for Star Wars fans and very very valuable to Disney+ while we gear up for the next set of films. We haven’t said anything more beyond what we’ve announced on the next film.”

He also offered praise for The Rise of Skywalker, a.k.a. Episode IX. “I haven’t seen IX finished yet, but I’m confident based on the pieces I’ve seen and the script that I read that it’s going to be extremely popular,” Iger said.

After releasing five films since purchasing Lucasfilm in 2012 — The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, Solo, and now The Rise of Skywalker — he said he believed “it would be smart for us to take a bit of a hiatus while we figure out what’s next.”

“We’re hard at work doing that already,” he said. “Three years was the proper amount of time to not only take a breather and reset, but really gear up for the next film’s release.”

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