Screenwriter Damon Lindelof has revealed new details on his canceled Star Wars movie, saying it would have been about the fight between nostalgia and reinvention.
Lindelof, best known for creating Lost, was hired by Lucasfilm to write a New Jedi Order movie that would see Daisy Ridley reprise her role as Rey Skywalker in a post-The Rise of Skywalker setting. However, he left the project in 2023, and we haven’t heard much about the movie since.
In an interview with The Ringer-Verse, Lindelof opened up about what he was trying to do with his Star Wars movie and why it fell by the wayside, saying it would have been about the opposing “Force of nostalgia” and “Force of revision,” in what would have amounted to “the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars.”
“Just to talk about the Bantha in the room, I was fired off of a Star Wars movie,” Lindelof began. “They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong. At least through that prism. But what we were attempting to do — my partners Justin Britt-Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I — what we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say, there is a Force of nostalgia and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another. And let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. And it didn’t work.
“You have your cake and eat it too.. but the conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, and that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
Lindelof, creator, writer, and executive producer of upcoming DC Studios TV show Lanterns, admitted there was more to his exit from Lucasfilm, pointing to writing struggles that couldn’t be worked through.
“And I may have been fired not just — because they seemed to like the premise — it was just, the writing was really hard,” he said. “It was slow. The tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode 9… Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things, they’re so massive. They’re so big.
“It’s the old tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit like this. That idea of like, we’re looking for the center of Star Wars. And when Episode 7 came out, we all knew what it was. It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe, and then we were migrating back in Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys. But we got the sense that when this new trilogy was over we were going to be launching with these new characters and that was the center of Star Wars.
“The new question is, are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars now?”
That’s a nod to The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first new Star Wars movie since 2019’s divisive Rise of Skywalker. As IGN has reported, The Mandalorian and Grogu enters theaters under intense box office scrutiny, but Lucasfilm reportedly believes next year’s Star Wars: Starfighter has a better chance of reviving the franchise.
IGN’s The Mandalorian and Grogu review returned a 5/10. We said: “If you’re looking for a Star Wars movie that thrills, surprises, challenges, or demonstrates a vested interest in seeing its characters grow and change… The Mandalorian and Grogu is not the way.”
There are a number of big picture questions about the future of Star Wars. While Ahsoka Season 2 is confirmed to be in the works for Disney+, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about other movies and shows Lucasfilm announced before Kathleen Kennedy stepped down as boss of the company. Kennedy made no mention of the previously-announced standalone movie set to feature Rey Skywalker during interviews earlier this year.
Rank The Star Wars Movies and TV Shows
Rank The Star Wars Movies and TV Shows
The project, revealed by Kennedy with fanfare three years ago at Star Wars Celebration 2023, is planned to feature the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey Skywalker, and reveal how the character founds a new era of the Jedi Order.
Kennedy announced the project on-stage alongside Ridley and director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who was confirmed to be helming the project. But in the years since — as with so many other Star Wars movies — little more has been said.
Discussing the standalone Rey movie’s plot in more detail, Kennedy described it as set 15 years after Rise of Skywalker. “We’re post-war, post-First Order, and the Jedi are in disarray, and there’s a lot of discussion around who are the Jedi, what are they doing, what’s the state of the galaxy?” Kennedy teased. “[Rey is] attempting to rebuild the Jedi Order based on the books, based on what she promised Luke.”
Of course, this isn’t the only project expected to feature Rey in the future. Lucasfilm is also incubating a new trilogy of movies from Simon Kinberg, the director behind the widely-panned X-Men movie Dark Phoenix and 2022 spy action flop The 355.
Perhaps notably, The Hollywood Reporter suggested in late 2024 that Rey’s future had subsequently become a matter of debate within Lucasfilm, as multiple projects from different directors sought to make use of the character. And while Kinberg’s trilogy was then earlier in development, it was noted that Obaid-Chinoy’s standalone movie had suffered setbacks, including the departure of writer Steven Knight.
But with Dave Filoni now in charge of Lucasfilm, everything we thought we knew about future Star Wars projects may now be wrong.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
