Has the Writer of ‘Star Wars Episode VII’ Already Been Found? And Don’t Worry, His Name Isn’t George Lucas

We're anywhere between two-and-a-half and three years away from the next Star Wars movie, but in big budget, tentpole Hollywood filmmaking that's a blink of an eye, which is why even though we're barely a week out from the announcement that Disney has acquired Lucasfilm and is moving ahead with a new sequel trilogy, there's been crumbs of details dropping from the Mouse's mouth to us on a near daily basis. Today's biggest morsel comes news from Entertainment Weekly that a writer for Episode VII has already been found and that man is Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt.

The one time Matthew Broderick assistant (you heard me right) has apparently already been tasked with writing a 40-50 page outline for the new film and trilogy and may soon begin work on busting out the script for the first movie. Let's face it, there's no choice that will please all fanboys. You could say Joss Whedon and some may complain that he's too glossy (and we already had that with the prequels) or you could say a name like Chris Nolan and people will say it'll be too dark in that vein. But Arndt, an Academy Award winner for Little Miss Sunshine, has an impressive resume including the next Hunger Games movie as well as next year's Tom Cruise pictures Oblivion, which already has strong buzz building ahead of its release.

Arndt's reps haven't confirmed any of this yet, so take it with a grain of salt, but the news seems pretty trustworthy and if it's true, I think we can all breathe a galactic sigh of relief that someone competent with the pen is going to be the one to put words back into Luke Skywalker's mouth for the foreseeable future and not, shall we say, someone who's greatest contribution to the original trilogy was stepping back to let Lawrence Kasdan take a crack at writing The Empire Strikes Back instead.