Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan developing even more new Star Wars movies. . .these character-focused

Lawrence Kasdan, writer of The Empire Strikes Back, and Simon Kinberg, who penned scripts for Sherlock Holmes and the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past, are working on standalone, character-focused, sequels to Star Wars. This was announced on CNBC by Disney CEO Bob Iger. Disney’s chairman says the spinoff movies will be created in addition to Disney‘s planned Star Wars VII, VIII and IX — the first of which is being written by Michael Arndt and directed by JJ Abrams. No word yet on which characters are involved in the spinoff films.

Iger said in part:

There has been speculation about some stand-alone films that have been in development and I can confirm to you today that in fact we are working on a few standalone films Larry Kasdan and Simon Kinberg are both working on films derived from great star wars characters that are not part of the overall saga so we still plan to make star wars 7, 8 and 9 roughly over a six year period of time starting in 2015 but they are going to be a few other films released in that period of time too.

Check out video of Iger on upcoming Star Wars film projects, below.