With Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu finally hitting theaters this month, the seven-year wait between Star Wars theatrical films is finally coming to a close. The last Star Wars movie to release in theaters prior to this was J.J. Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, which, just for context, was released before the COVID-19 pandemic.
So despite the fact that seven years is far from the longest the franchise has gone between cinematic installments, to say it felt significantly and culturally much longer than that is an understatement.
A huge contributing factor to the wait feeling so delayed and elongated was the strange way that Disney and Lucasfilm chose to operate during this time period, constantly signing on new filmmakers to write new films, announcing them, and then unceremoniously scrapping them before they ever even made it to production proper.
What Damon Lindelof’s Star Wars movie could’ve been
Literally dozens of different projects were made public, to one extent or another, between 2019 and now that were planned Star Wars films that went unmade. One of the most interesting of these has long been Damon Lindelof’s New Jedi Order film, and now, the prolific creative is spliing the beans about exactly what that film might’ve been.
Lindelof has been a subversive and highly influential voice in modern entertainment for several decades now. Famously, he was one of the heads of the massive TV show Lost. In the years since then, Lindelof has proven time and again that he’s an absolutely fascinating and meticulous genre storyteller, having crafted Emmy Award-winning masterpieces like The Leftovers and his Watchmen TV series. To this end, the idea of Lindelof tackling Star Wars is immediately enticing, and his description of what the project could have been makes it sound even more so.
During an interview with The Ringer, Lindelof stated,“And just to talk about the Bantha in the room, I was fired off of a Star Wars movie... They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be? ‘And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’”
“What we were attempting to do was to have this conversation (about the push and pull of nostalgia versus innovation within the Star Wars franchise) in the movie,” Lindelof said. “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.”
This film would go on to become the one that was announced as the Rey movie at Star Wars Celebration in 2023, shortly after Lindelof’s firing, having clearly been reworked in some capacity. However, that film and all of the others announced at that event (such as Dave Filoni’s Mando-verse crossover film and James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi film) have all either stalled out or been scrapped entirely, as the whole of The Mandalorian and Grogu and next year’s Starfighter will have been announced, made, and released since any forward momentum has happened for any of these projects.
On the whole, this seems like a massive shame. Lindelof’s take on the material sounds fascinating, and as if it would have engaged with the thematic crux of things like the prequel trilogy and The Last Jedi in fascinating ways, while still being its own distinct thing. But obviously, that isn’t what Disney wants right now; they want safe, commodifiable, and entirely devoid of anything resembling an opinion. So instead, we all get to sit through the feature-length placeholder that is The Mandalorian and Grogu.
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