Not really. They had years of pent-up demand and buzz from deranged 80s kids that in 1999 were parents. The 2015-starting series has a few years of mild demand from lacklustre prequels. The excitement from the original trilogy has gone. A new Star Wars movie will not be the special occasion that it was in 1999 or 1980.

Attendance:

Star Wars - 142m
ESB - 79m
ROTJ - 81m

TPM - 84m
AOTC - 52m
ROTS - 59m

Once the built-up demand was used (TPM), the attendance dropped significantly. It went up slightly for the "finale " factor, but overall the attendance has dropped too much to make it viable to make loads more. If they announced just 3 more to complete a nine installment series, then I would be on board, but they didn't announce that; what they announced was a horrible plan to dilute this brand into something cheap, tacky, and worst of all, expected. When films are expected annually, or even biennially, audiences get bored (Saw, PA).

Mild demand? How many hours has it been? How many people sincerely thought there would be any more Star Wars films before today? Lets give the demand more than twelve hours. Not to also mention that by the time the next film comes out, it will have been ten years since Sith, which I think most people would agree was the best out of the prequels and far from bad.



Overt excitement maybe, but not nostalgia. And Star Wars is gaining fans everyday when new kids are introduced to it by those parents.



What movies are? It still won't stop the new films from making well over a billion dollars each worldwide.



What's inflation, 3D, and IMAX again? The new films could drop into the mid to high 40's and Disney would be more than pleased.

Star Wars series adjusted for inflation...

Star Wars - $1,144,726,800
The Empire Strikes Back - $632,475,100
Return of the Jedi - $649,486,700

How many films today make that kind of money?

Avatar and The Avengers. It's a very short list.

Now with the prequels...

The Phantom Menace - $680,303,000 - 84 million tickets sold
Attack of the Clones - $417,138,400 - 52 million tickets sold
Revenge of the Sith - $475,783,200 - 59 million tickets sold

45-50 million tickets in a few years will get them very similar numbers to the last two prequels. They'll take that.



Because making an additional three to the original trilogy didn't already do that. And yet the series lives!

Somebody's gotta buy the TV. But yeah, you're right. Star Wars just continues to expand it's audience the older it gets.

The old adjusted for inflation argument is void. I thought I was talking to someone that was knowledgeable about box office. Obviously I wasn't.

Prove me wrong.

You're the one who brought up the tickets sold.

Build your own education. It's not my responsibility to teach anything to you guys.

You want to use a flawed method to predict box office, go ahead. I've given you an idea, now you can research that idea or you can ignore it. I don't care which.

The problem though is that you brought up ticket sales. So obviously you buy into it a little bit (again, probably when it favors your argument). Ticket sales go hand-in-hand with adjusted numbers, and they're especially more valid to more recent movies (the past decade...where the prequels just happen to fall) because there isn't much of a discrepancy in attendance figures.

So will Jedi be in the Avengers 2?

In a way it's good that the prequels destroyed the series' credibility because now anyone can take it in a totally new and potentially amazing direction that would not have been possible before if the series as a whole continued to be a classic, venerated property that had to keep a certain style or would be viewed as too radical a change. It's like Maoism, you have to destroy to build anew.

Episode VII also has a fresh, unexplored (on film) frontier ahead of it. Room for almost unlimited imagination. The prequels were focused on a character and milieu the audience knew to be doomed.

I wonder if there is any chance Lucas can't help himself and winds up in the director's chair again, similar to Peter Jackson and The Hobbit.

Lucas should be involved in the overall story but should stay away from directing and screenplay.

Agree that the fact that these will be sequels allows them to have an element of freshness and excitement that the prequels could never have. I remember reading some leaked summary of what the prequels would be about in 1998 and they ended up almost identical to the summaries. Wasn't hard to figure where the story was headed.

Many stories can be told from here on, though I do kind of wish that they only anounced 3 sequels only.

Kinda late in responding to this, but wasn't the prequel trilogy not announced until early 1997, a little more than two years before TPM opened? Especially with treatments already done, a year to get the ball rolling should be enough time.

Bradley Cooper in the Han Solo type role

I got home yesterday and I saw this and my jaw dropped. Overall, I see tremendous potential in this move.

Nobody's mentioned it, but Hamill, Fisher, and Ford are still alive. Any chance they would be involved in Ep. VII in any way? I don't know the story beyond Return of the Jedi, so I don't know if it would fit or not.

I doubt Ford would return.

I know he did a lot of stuff before Star Wars, but Star Wars is what made him a star. I could see him coming back in a small role, maybe with Fisher as parents of a bigger character. Hamill is pretty much voice work now. I doubt he'd appear, but there could be a voice-over or something. At least for the first movie, I would like someone to appear to connect it to Episode VI in some way (Aside from Chewy or the droids).

This is probably the biggest HOLY SHIT movie news I've heard in my lifetime.

bradley cooper as han solo jr!

Episode 7 is going to be bloody epic!

I would pay tons of money for Han Solo to have a cameo in Ep.7.

TONS.

These are the names I'm hearing Disney is interested in. I don't know how Whedon would work with Avengers 2, but my guy says he's on the short list.

Joss Whedon
Sam Raimi
Brad Bird
Timur Bekmambetov
Genndy Tartakovsky

He doesn't hate star wars, he hates what it did to his personal life. And he personally felt his character had done all it could after Empire.

Ford doing two sci fi films in the last 3 years gives it help. I'd see him as a mentor type character but he's doing that in Ender's Game.

Luke would have to be in it though, after all he would be the only one to bring the jedi back.

I don't know what would be weirder though, a new non canon star wars film, or seeing the Disney Logo before the initial Star Wars credits. I'm definitely intrigued though.

Timur Bekmambetov!