May 25, 2022 – Well, it’s been fun running this blog site for the last nine years.
Star Wars as a concept has evolved and changed dramatically since the original Star Wars movie hit theaters on May 25, 1977 – an amazing 45 years ago.
But just as Star Wars has changed, so have we, including our interests, our passions, our obsessions.
Cue the exit music as another binary sunset slowly fades to black.
April 1, 2022 – Ewan McGregor has announced on Twitter that the premiere for the upcoming series, Obi-Wan Kenobi, is moving to a Friday May 27th debut. In addition, the first two episodes will be streaming on Disney+ on the same day.
March 9, 2022 – The newest Disney+ series, Obi-Wan Kenobi, will begin streaming on May 25th, and Disney has released the first trailer to promote it.
Seventeen years after the premiere of Revenge of the Sith (2005), an older Ewan McGregor reprises his role as Obi-Wan. Likewise, Hayden Christensen returns as Darth Vader. The rest of the cast includes actors Moses Ingram, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Kumail Nanjiani, Indira Varma, Rupert Friend, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Sung Kang, Simone Kessell, and Benny Safdie.
March 7, 2022 – Star Wars Celebration tickets will go on sale again beginning at 12noon PT on March 15th. Click HERE for more info.
Proof of an approved and full COVID-19 vaccination will be required prior to entry for all attendees ages 5 and older. If younger than 5 years old, proof is required of a negative COVID-19 test administered one day (antigen) or two days (PCR) before entry at Celebration.
Star Wars Celebration Anaheim runs from 26-29 May 2022.
February 25, 2022 – Scheduled to open to the public on March 1st, Disney’s Star Wars hotel – AKA “The Halcyon” or the Star Wars: Galactic Star Cruiser – opened its cargo bay doors to the media for a four-hour peek into Walt Disney World’s newest hotel experience.
The YouTube channel “TheTimTracker” gives a solid preview of what you might expect to see aboard the Halcyon:
Prices are rather steep at approximately $5,000 to $6,000 for a two-day/two-night stay. Prices differ depending on the time of year, number of guests and the type of cabin (i.e., hotel room accommodation) reserved.
Disney has called the Halycon a “first-of-its-kind immersive experience.”
The resort is a short shuttle ride away to the Galaxy’s Edge land at Hollywood Studios in Orlando. Disney encourages guests to dress in Star Wars-inspired attire during their stay.
Feb. 15, 2022 – Trailer description: “Jedi Master Denolm Orr and his Padawan, Sa’har Kateen, travel to the Temple of Nul on Elom to retrieve a special holocron before the Sith Empire can. They seem to have the upperhand, until an unexpected enemy appears…“
Feb. 15, 2022 – Spider-Man: No Way Home has just become the third-highest domestic (U.S.) grossing film, bumping James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to fourth place.
The web-crawler’s latest film has so far raked in a U.S. domestic gross of 760.9 million dollars, edging out Avatar‘s 760.5 million dollars.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) remains No. 1 in U.S. domestic box office receipts of 936 million dollars.
Avengers: Endgame (2019) is No. 2 with a domestic gross of 858 million dollars.
If you want to compare apples (above) with oranges (total worldwide gross receipts), then the highest grossing films – after adjusting for inflation – are:
February 14, 2022 – For all you love-challenged Jedi and Sith lords out there, a message from Boba Fett:
February 10, 2022 – May will be a busy month for Star Wars fans: On the eve of Celebration Anaheim (26-29 May), Disney+ will begin streaming the long-awaited new series, Obi-Wan Kenobi on May 25th.
When we last saw the (younger) Obi-Wan Kenobi, he had defeated his good friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, on the planet Mustafar. In one of the closing scenes of Revenge of the Sith (2005), our last glimpse of Obi-Wan is his silent delivery of the baby Luke to his new family, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, on Tatooine. Obi-Wan then heads off into exile in the Jundland Wastes.
We will finally discover what happened to Obi-Wan during his self-imposed exile. Ewan McGregor reprises his role as the older Jedi Master.
February 8, 2022 – Robert Blalack, one of the co-founders of Industrial Light & Magic, has died of cancer at the age of 73. He passed away at his home in Paris.
He was part of a team of groundbreaking visual effects artists who were employed on the original Star Wars (1977). Blalack and his co-workers – John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund and Grant McCune – all received the Oscar for Visual Effects at the 50th Annual Academy Awards in 1978.
Blalack also shared an Emmy for his visual effects work on The Day After (1983), a film on the American television network ABC, about a nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The TV film attracted 100 million viewers and was the highest-rated TV movie in history at the time.
During an ILM reunion in 2017, Robert Blalack said, “We discovered that building ILM from scratch during production was like jumping out of a plane and stitching up the parachute during free fall.”
Some of his many other works include visual effects for movies such as Blues Brothers, Airplane! and RoboCop as well as a 13-part PBS documentary series, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage released in 1980.
FUTURE of STAR WARS 