Lucasfilm last released a Star Wars movie in 2019: The Rise of Skywalker. Since then, it's announced many projects only for them to get cancelled or quietly fade away. At one point Marvel Studios CEO Kevin Feige was going to make a Star Wars movie. That's not happening. Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi was going to make one, but he's not sure if it'll ever happen. Both Rian Johnson and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss were going to make whole trilogies, but they faded away.
To be fair, the problem isn't so much that these projects got cancelled — that happens all the time behind the scenes in Hollywood — but more that Lucasfilm kept announcing them long before they were ready. It gave the impression that they were the studio that cried Star Wars, to the point where it's hard to trust if their current film projects — which include a Rey movie and a Mandalorian movie — will ever actually get made. They have some trust to earn back.
The worst example of this was a Rogue Squadron movie from Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins; Lucasfilm even made a little teaser for that film featuring Jenkins in a flight suit, which made it extra embarrassing when the movie sort of flamed out:
However, according to Jenkins, that movie might not be fully dead after all? “When I left Star Wars to do Wonder Woman 3, and I started working on that, we talked about, ‘Well, maybe I’ll come back to Star Wars after Wonder Woman 3,’ so we started a deal for that to happen,” she said on the Talking Pictures podcast. “When Wonder Woman 3 then went away, Lucasfilm and I were like ‘Oh, we’ve got to finish this deal.’ We finished the deal right as the strike was beginning, so I now owe a draft of Star Wars.”
"They have a hard job in front of them of, 'What’s the first movie they’re going to do?' They have other directors who have been working, but I am now back on doing Rogue Squadron. We’ll see what happens. We need to get it to where we’re both super happy with it."
Does this mean that the Rogue Squadron movie is definitely happening? After all the back and forth about past movies, I don't think we can say that for sure. If I were Disney, which owns Lucasfilm, I would do everything I can not to reveal that they're making any kind of movie until they actually have a couple seconds of footage to show. Otherwise people are going to assume that every new Star Wars project they hear about won't make it to the screen as a rule.
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h/t IGN