Anna Daniels
As one might imagine, Abrams is going to be plenty busy after his departure from Lucasfilm. His production company, Bad Robot, inked a five-year pact with WarnerMedia earlier this year; worth a whopping $250 million dollars, the deal is expected to yield multiple feature and serial projects across a variety of platforms, which Abrams will be producing. (via CBR)
The deal doesn’t keep Abrams from working on projects with third parties, however, so he’s still free to continue laboring away on existing series with HBO (Lovecraft Country, Westworld), Hulu (Castle Rock), and Apple TV (Demimonde, Lisey’s Story). In addition to all of that, he’ll have various degrees of involvement with several high-profile feature films which are in the pipeline.
Chief among these: the seventh and eighth installments in the very popular, highly lucrative Mission: Impossible franchise, which will shoot back-to-back under the direction of returning helmer Christopher McQuarrie. The Mission: Impossible movies have thus far generated over $3.5 billion dollars at the worldwide box office, with this year’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout responsible for $787 million dollars all by its lonesome. As such, M:I 7 and 8 are full steam ahead, having already scored release dates: July 23, 2021, and August 5, 2022, respectively.
There’s also a fourth installment in the rebooted Star Trek series on the way, this one from Lucy in the Sky writer/director Noah Hawley. The fact that this flick appears to be gearing up to enter production may mean that the long-rumored Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie may be dead in the water — but, knowing the mercurial Tarantino, it may not be. Abrams will be on board as a producer for that movie, too, if it ever happens.
There’s also another hotly-anticipated sequel in the works with which Abrams may be a bit more directly involved: the fourth film in the Cloverfield franchise, which is said to be a direct sequel to the 2008 original. (2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane and 2018’s The Cloverfield Paradox were tangential stories set in the same universe.) As far back as April 2018, Abrams confirmed that a “true, dedicated Cloverfield sequel” was in development (via Variety), and while Abrams’ IMDb page lists him as a writer on the project, this has not been confirmed.
Finally, there are only about a billion projects to which Abrams and Bad Robot are attached that have been announced over the last few years and which may or may not still be in various stages of development. Among these: Your Name, a live-action anime adaptation from The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb; Kolma, a fantasy/thriller starring The Rise of Skywalker‘s Daisy Ridley; and live-action features based on the iconic Valve video games Portal and Half-Life.
All of which is to say that if Abrams does feel like returning to the Star Wars fold anytime soon, he may need to consider cloning himself. We’re inclined to take him at his word, though — unless the next filmmaker Lucasfilm hires just totally drops the ball. If the studio were to give Abrams a call a year or two down the road, we’re not sure he’d be able to resist.
Written by: Looper
