Writer, actor, and all-around artistic genius Lin-Manual Miranda has been enjoying a blockbuster year. His Founding Fathers-centric historical rap musical Hamilton has been the talk of Broadway since the summer. The original cast recording album of the musical hit the top spot on the Billboard rap albums chart. And Miranda had a barnburner of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, doing a Wheel of Freestyle rap battle with Black Thought from The Roots.
But last night, television viewers found out that Miranda’s year is about to get even better. J.J. Abrams, in full swing on the promotional tour for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, dropped by to talk with Fallon about the hotly anticipated film. It was expected that he'd connect with Fallon about the legacy of the franchise—but nobody thought they'd hear a story of how Abrams saw Hamilton, met Miranda, and then offered the composer the chance to write some music for his new Star Wars movie. It turns out that John Williams only wanted to do the score and not the diegetic music within the world of The Force Awakens. So Abrams brought in Miranda to co-write the music for what he calls "our version of the Cantina scene."
Disney is going all-in on new Star Wars material, from spin-off standalone films to every kind of product licensing imaginable. What’s to say that they won’t tap a musical genius like Miranda to try his hand at crafting a stage musical set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?
