'Godzilla' Director Joins 2016 'Star Wars' Spin-off

New content is being drip-fed out of the Star Wars: Episode VII camp at the moment. Most notably, a video providing details of a charity-driven competition for the winning fan to appear in the eagerly awaited sequel has been doing the rounds, but the rest of the galaxy has also been far from quiet, with news emerging today that Godzilla (2014) director Gareth Edwards has signed on to direct the series' first stand-alone spin-off.

The film, due out on December 16, 2016, will have its screenplay written by Gary Whitta, who has previously plied his penmanship to Denzel Washington vehicle The Book Of Eli, as well as – arguably more impressively, depending on your interests – serving on the BAFTA Award-winning writing team for Telltale Games' episodic The Walking Dead series.

For his part, Edwards' breakthrough directorial effort Monsters (2010) – on which he also served as writer, visual effects artist and cinematographer – was directly responsible for his assignment on Godzilla, and it seems Lucasfilm and Disney are impressed enough with his work on that film (as was our film reviewer Anthony Carew) to see fit to pass him the torch for the first Star Wars spin-off. For Edwards, the job is a dream come true.

“Ever since I saw Star Wars, I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life -- join the Rebel Alliance! I could not be more excited and honoured to go on this mission with Lucasfilm,” Edwards said in a statement.

The title, main character, plot and basically every other detail of the first spin-off is still very much up in the air, although Entertainment Weekly reported back in February that at least two of the three posited spin-offs would deal (separately) with the characters of Han Solo and Boba Fett, with Disney CFO Jay Rasulo previously describing the stand-alone films as “origin stories”.