Star Wars composer John Williams has indicated that he will only score one more franchise movie.
Film music icon Williams – who has also handled the soundtracks for Jaws, ET, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and more over his illustrious career – recently spoke to California radio station KUSC when he suggested that he would quit the Star Wars franchise after Episode IX, expected in 2019.
Williams has scored nine Star Wars films to date: the original Star Wars, its original sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, plus The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.
He handed over the reins for 2016’s Rogue One to Michael Giacchino, while John Powell will score this year’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Williams has now told KUSC: “We know JJ Abrams is preparing one [Star Wars movie] now that I will hopefully do next year for him. I look forward it. It will round out a series of nine, that will be quite enough for me.”
Back in 2016, Williams admitted that he hadn’t watched any of the Star Wars movies that he scored, describing his soundtracks for the films as “not very memorable”.
“I let it go,” he told The Mirror. “‘I have not looked at the Star Wars films and that’s absolutely true. When I’m finished with a film, I’ve been living with it, we’ve been dubbing it, recording to it, and so on. You walk out of the studio and, ‘Ah, it’s finished.'”
“Now I don’t have an impulse to go to the theatre and look at it,” he added. “Maybe some people find that weird, or listen to recordings of my music very, very rarely.”
“A lot of them are not very memorable and so on. It’s probably the most popular music that I’ve done.”
Find out everything we know about Star Wars Episode IX here.