As Lucasfilm rolls out its first Star Wars movie for seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu, all eyes are on the struggling Disney franchise to see if this new outing from a galaxy far, far away can make a splash at the box office.
Various Star Wars movies have been in the works since the release of The Rise of Skywalker back in 2019, but most have lingered in development hell before being nixed. Only the aforementioned theatrical debut of the franchise’s live-action TV series and a forthcoming Ryan Gosling movie called Starfighter have entered production to date, and the writer behind one of Lucasfilm’s nixed projects has been giving fans a peek behind the scenes while discussing the reasons that his own take didn’t make the grade.
Lost and Watchmen scribe Damon Lindelof recently stopped by The Ringer-Verse’s House of R podcast to chat about all things Star Wars, where he opened up about being fired from a proposed Rey-centric “Protestant Reformation” project that would have explored the iconic fantasy universe beyond Rise of Skywalker.
“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,” Lindelof told the pod. “And so I was wrong. At least through that prism. What we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon and I, 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. The conversation that the fandom is having without winking and looking at the audience… that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
