Taika Waititi will write and direct a new Star Wars movie!

After Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker premiered at the end of last year, Disney said the Star Wars movies were going on a “hiatus” for a while. (Note that only the movies were going on a hiatus; there are so many Star Wars TV shows coming to Disney+ I’m starting to lose count.)

At the same time, Disney looked like it was reshuffling the plans it had in place. Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss were originally signed on to make a new tirlogy of Star Wars movies, and then they weren’t. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson was originally going to make a trilogy, as well, but we’ve heard precious little about it, and wouldn’t be surprised if it were also being rethought. Things were in flux.

But we never expected the “hiatus” to last for long; there’s too much money to be made from Star Wars. A few months back, we heard that Disney was approaching Hollywood golden boy Taika Waititi — the director of Thor: Ragnarok and the Oscar-nominated Jojo Rabbit — to make a new Star Wars film. Now, StarWars.com confirms that this is exactly what’s happening. Waititi will direct and co-write a new movie. Joining him on the screenplay side is Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who won a BAFTA for her work on the screenplay for 1917.

Taika Waititi is a Hollywood golden boy for a reason: his movies are generally really good. (He also directed the season final of The Mandalorian, which was excellent.) However…I can’t help but wonder if the industry is leaning on him a bit too much. He’s brilliant and everything, but the base idea still for the project still has to be good.

Plus, he’s involved with so much right now it’s hard to know when this new Star Wars movie will come out — there’s no release date at the moment. His next movie will be Thor: Love and Thunder. He’s also attached to direct a live-action adaptation of Akira, but that project’s been in development hell forever and I wouldn’t be surprised if it languished there a while longer.

We also don’t know what the new movie is about. Disney has shown a willingness to branch out a bit from the “Skywalker saga” recently and explore other parts of the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian has been fun in large part because it’s so self-contained, and the company is diving into the distant past for its upcoming High Republic publishing initiative. So Waititi’s movie could be just about anything.

Anyway, for all the Star Wars fans out there celebrating May the 4th, this is a lovely gift.

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