STAR WARS Leads List of Tie-ins, Week of Dec. 14
Lines began forming for the 7th installment of Star Wars:The Force Awakens, as early as last Saturday, 12 days ahead of its Thursday midnight opening.
There’s is a raft of Star Wars branded products to occupy them. As the Seattle Times points out, this is the first Star Wars movie “from merchandise-driven Disney.” following their acquisition of Lucasfilm.
You can get Death Star shoes and even Star Wars mascara and, of course, a wide range of collectibles, introduced earlier this year. Lucas film president Kathleen Kennedy comments in brand-speak, “Star Wars toys have always played an important role in how our fans interact with the Saga.”
Several Force Awakens branded titles were released in September and a whole new set is scheduled for release next Friday. However, the print novelization is being held off until January, to avoid spoilers (that does not apply to the eBook edition, scheduled for release the same day as the movie).
StarWars.com lists and annotates the books and PRH/Del Rey has a Facebook page for their titles, including the recent “official cover reveal” of Chuck Windig’s sequel, Aftermath: Life Debt, May 31, 2016. For ordering information, check our listing of tie-ins (minus library-unfriendly merch. items, like sticker books and those that include light sabers).The title currently highest on Amazon’s sales rankings is Pablo Hidalgo’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary (Penguin/DK).
If you had any doubts, there will be more Star Wars movies. Wired predicts “You Won’t Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie” and JJ Abrams, director of the current movie, is touting Selma director Ava DuVernay for future iterations.
Other tie-in arriving this week follow the normal pattern of being pubished months in advance of the movies:
Snowden (The Snowden Files Movie Tie In Edition): The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, Luke Harding (PRH/Vintage).
Oliver Stone is taking on the Snowden story in a film set for release on May 15, 2016. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Snowden, along with Shailene Woodley and Nicholas Cage. The script is based on Harding’s nonfiction account, which published as an original trade paperback in the U.S. in February 2014.
For a while there was a duel going on for film dominance.
Sony bought rights to Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Macmillan/Metropolitan Books) in 2014 (see our story here on the rivalry between Harding and Greenwald). However, Greenwald’s own website reports, relying ironically on leaks from the Sony email hack, that the film based on No Place to Hide is likely dead in the water, quoting an email from a Sony executive as saying the Stone film “will beat our Snowden project to market and therefore ours is unlikely to happen … We ended up passing after seriously considering the project.”
A teaser trailer has been released:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Movie Tie-in Edition) by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books).
The godmother of the mashup genre, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, finally makes it to the screen, beginning Feb. 19 in a film starring Lily James (Cinderella, Downton Abbey and the upcoming BBC adaptation of War and Peace) as Elizabeth Bennett and Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy.
As we reported earlier, many leading ladies have been rumored or announced, including Natalie Portman, Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Mia Wasikowska and Rooney Mara.