Next ‘Star Wars’ film’s future in doubt as Damon Lindelof and partner exit
There’s a lot that’s happening in the galaxy far, far away—but all of it, for now, is happening directly on Disney+. The Kathleen Kennedy-led Lucasfilms shingle has found itself unable to make the jump to hyperspace and get a new feature before cameras.
Deadline has reported that the untitled project intended to come next in the franchise just lost its two writers, Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson. The announced director, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is still on board. The outlet suggests that more details about the film were to have been announced at the Star Wars Celebration pep rally in London next month, but with the amount of flux currently going on behind the scenes, there might be less information to share.
Nevertheless, Obaid-Chinoy’s film is still poised to be the follow-up to J.J. Abrams’s “The Rise of Skywalker,” the last Star Wars property to play in movie theaters. That film, while it may have been the source of some consternation in the “fan community” (as was the one before it, but from a different faction) had a worldwide gross of $1.07 billion—that’s billion with a B—so I can assure you there is one group of people who loved the picture: stockholders in The Walt Disney Company.
Lindelof, a long-time flag-waving Gen X nerd, told fanboy outlet SlashFilm earlier this month that nailing the script was tough-going. “If [the film] can’t be great, it shouldn’t exist,” he said, before waxing about seeing the original “Star Wars” as a kid in the 1970s. His most recent project, an adaptation of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” in 2019, was a resounding success with both critics and fans, receiving 11 Primetime and Creative Arts Emmys off 26 nominations.
Justin Britt-Gibson’s most recent credits include writing three episodes of the J.K. Simmons Starz spy-fy series “Counterpart,” and as a writer-story editor on “The Strain.” Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is a longtime veteran of PBS documentaries and has a few episodes of “Ms. Marvel” under her belt.
Not long ago Lucasfilm pulled the plug on Patty Jenkins’s “Top Gun”-esque “Rogue Squadron” project. You may also recall that a deal was also in place for “Game of Thrones” developers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to create a trilogy of films, and that “The Last Jedi” writer-director Rian Johnson was commissioned to create a trilogy of his own. Neither of those projects is in active development any longer. The only other film still cooking, it is believed, is one from Taika Waititi, who is writing and directing a film set in the Star Wars universe for him to star in himself. The Oscar-winner has directed an episode of “The Mandalorian,” and also voiced the deep-cut character IG-88.
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