Star Wars Episode VII Takes Place 30 Years After ‘Jedi’

The new Star Wars movie will follow the same chronology of the real world.

Yesterday Disney held their annual shareholders meeting, and CEO Bob Iger included Star Wars in the presentation.  Not much Episode VII news came out of the event, but Iger did say that the new story will pick up 30 years after the events of Return of the Jedi, making the new movies set in (roughly) real time.

The meeting seemed like a great venue to finally announce some more substantive news for the new movie– which is still planned to start filming in May… but that’s about all we got.  Still no casting announcements, either for new characters or for any of the strongly rumored returning cast from the Original Trilogy… just the news that the story will take place three decades later, more confirmation the movie will hit theaters December 2015, and this little bit from a press release:

[Episode VII] will star a trio of new young leads along with some very familiar faces.

I’m still curious if the un-announced cast is being kept under wraps as part of director JJ Abrams’ penchant for needless mystery (see: Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness), or if the production is legitimately still trying to figure it all out? We’ll obviously know very soon… but I hope at this point Abrams and Disney do something special with their cast and name reveal. Rather than have the info trickle out or chase a leak, it seems like the perfect opportunity to pull back the curtain with one major reveal of everything– the name, the new characters, the returning cast– in one fell swoop.  That’s what I’m hoping for…