With J.J. Abrams officially signed on to direct "Star Wars Episode 7," Disney has announced that the project is officially in development. More importantly, the studio and Lucasfilm are focusing so heavily on the upcoming installment that they have decided to postpone future releases of the prequels in 3-D.
"Given the recent development that we are moving forward with a new 'Star Wars' trilogy we will now focus 100 percent of our efforts on 'Star Wars: Episode VII' in order to ensure the best possible experience for our fans," Lucasfilm said in a statement. "We will post further information about our 3D release plans at a later date."
"Episode II: Attack of the Clones" and "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" were slated for fall releases. "Episode I - The Phantom Menace" was released in 3-D in February 2012 and grossed $22.4 million domestically its opening weekend. The plan had been to release all six of the "Star Wars" movies in 3-D over the span of six years.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Star Wars creator George Lucas told the publication that original plans had been to release all the films at once but that he didn't think it would work. The filmmaker noted that, "Everyone will go to the first one or two, and pretty soon you'll be spending a lot of money and not having a lot of people come see the movie. I wanted to do it every year, and I wanted to make something that was sort of reliable. I wanted to put the same amount of effort into each conversion. It takes about nine months to do it."
"Episode 7" is slated for a 2015 release date, but as previously reported Abrams is not tied to any release date.
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