AmazonMGM studios, who recently got the rights to the James Bond, 007 series have announced that Dune~2020 director Denis Villeneuve will helm and produce the next movie in the long running series.

The Last movie, No Time To Die was released in 2021 after a year delay due to the COVID 19 cinema closures and it saw the end of the Broccoli era and the Daniel Craig series of movies.

Since then online retailer Amazon has bought MGM Studio who co-owned the rights to the series and have taken full controll of the movie rights.

Getting director Villeneuve in to direct and produce potentially means that Amazon are taking the series in much darker direction.

Its still early days yet and a script needs to be written, as well as a title announcement etc., and there has been no announcement yet of who will even play the title character after the departure of Craig in the last movie.

No idea of a release window as the director is in production of the third Dune movie Dune Messiah currently.

Via Variety

When directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller departed the Solo: A Star Wars Story earlier this year it was a bit of a shock, now 'history' is repeating itself and today Lucasfilms have announced the departure of Colin Trevorrow from Episode IX.

See the official announcement on starwars.com.

The film is very much is pre-production so nothing has been filmed yet which, unlike the Han Solo movie

That movie got a big time Hollywood director in Ron Howard the come in and finish the film off, and reshoot much of the movie.

With that in mind who could come in to direct Episode IX?

How about Ron Howard? He's already in the fold, or even better Steven Spielberg, he's always said he'd like to do a Star Wars movie?

JJ Abrams must be in with a shot after the fantastic job on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, or how about Guillermo del Toro to bring a darker twist to what could be a darker movie, and talking of dark how about Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve.

Ridley Scott could do a good job and bring an interesting twist to the series and finally a man who has been in the Star Wars universe for many years, how about giving Lawrence Kasdan a shot?

I am sure it wont be long before we hear who will take the Episode IX directors chair, until then we can keep on guessing, but whoever it is they need to wrap up a 40 year long story, not an easy talk!

Fans are divided over the news that @colintrevorrow will no longer be directing Star Wars: Episode IX. https://t.co/4bPgmZ9O6z

— Twitter Moments (@TwitterMoments) September 5, 2017