Star Wars | Lucasfilm is exceptionally good at not making movies

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With The Mandalorian And Grogu still over a year away, a look at some of the Star Wars films Lucasfilm hasn’t made since 2019.


The release of 2015’s The Force Awakens sparked the beginning of a frenzied five years for the Star Wars franchise. It was a period that saw a new film in the series released annually, with numbered sequels interspersed with the spin-offs Rogue One (2016) and Solo (2018). Then 2019 happened, and things went rather quiet.

One problem, for Disney-owned production company Lucasfilm, was that 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker barely made a billion dollars in cinemas – only half of what The Force Awakens had made four years earlier. The other problem was that Solo: A Star Wars Story, which cost somewhere around $270m to make, only made $400m.

Those declining numbers appeared to give Lucasfilm pause, because it’s spent the years since announcing or hyping future Star Wars movies, but only recently getting around to actually making one. Instead, the company has concentrated on its TV output: The Mandalorian, Ahsoka and Andor are among the numerous Star Wars shows you’ll currently find on Disney+. More are on the way, including December’s kid-friendly Skeleton Crew. For a generation of younger people, a franchise that changed cinema in the 1970s is now the preserve of the small screen. 

It’s telling, really, that the one Star Wars film that is definitely in production – it began shooting in June – is a spin-off from a television series. The Mandalorian And Grogu, due to appear in cinemas in May 2026, is the work of Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, with the former directing and co-writing with the latter. The pair created the original Mandalorian show, which was evidently such a ratings hit that Lucasfilm has essentially used it as the platform to re-launch the Star Wars franchise in cinemas. Indeed, the company appears to be so bullish on The Mandalorian And Grogu’s prospects that regular series actor Giancarlo Esposito believes there are secret plans to turn it into a trilogy.

Grogu and Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) in Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian season three.
Grogu and Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) in Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian season three. Credit: Disney/Lucasfilm.

Work on another film, Dawn Of The Jedi, also appears to be gathering pace. Announced at 2023’s Star Wars Celebration, the prequel – set thousands of years before the mainline series’ events – will be directed by James Mangold, while Andor and House Of Cards’ wordsmith Beau Willimon was announced as co-writer in April. Speaking to Empire at the time, Willimon described his pitch for the film as “a biblical epic, like a Ten Commandments about the dawning of the Force.”

Only time will tell, however, whether Dawn Of The Jedi will start filming over the next year or so, or whether it’ll join the long list of Star Wars movies Lucasfilm hasn’t made since 2019. 

The ones we know about are:

Rogue Squadron

Director: Patty Jenkins

Current status: A film that has appeared on Lucasfilm’s production calendar only to vanish again more than once, Rogue Squadron is still happening, according to Jenkins. In May, she said, “I am now back on doing Rogue Squadron. We’ll see what happens. Who knows?” It doesn’t sound as though it’s exactly motoring along, in other words. 

Star Wars Rogue Squadron
To date, we don’t have a Rogue Squadron movie, but we do have this particularly nice logo. Credit: Disney/Lucasfilm.

Untitled Star Wars Project

Director: Taika Waititi

Current status: “Taika is working away on this,” Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy said in May 2023. “He’s just… slow. We’ve got a couple of acts, we need a third.”

Another Untitled Star Wars Project

Director: Shawn Levy

Current status: Unclear, but after the success of Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s possible that Disney will be keen to have Levy work on a Star Wars film next. The filmmaker has said he wants to make a standalone entry in the franchise. Beyond that, it’s all rather vague.

Read more: Lucasfilm and Star Wars | The status of its 2020 slate of film and TV projects

New Jedi Order

Director: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Current status: Rumoured to be on indefinite hold. Daisy Ridley was set to return as Rey, but Lucasfilm was reportedly unhappy with the scripts handed in by Steven Knight. The latest word from the production is that Knight, perhaps weary from all the studio notes and drafts, has made a quiet exit. Obaid-Chinoy, who previously directed episodes of Ms Marvel for Disney+, is still attached, though.

Lando

Director: Unannounced

Current status: A film spin-off starring Donald Glover’s younger incarnation of the cloaked space scoundrel was only announced in September 2023, so it’s still early days. Before that, Lando was planned as a Disney+ TV series before Lucasfilm changed its mind. Unfortunately, nobody at the company bothered to tell its would-be showrunner, Justin Simien, who found out about the cancellation by reading about it online. “I am in grief,” he said of his scrapped project. “I do not feel good.” Genuinely: poor chap.

Coming to a screen near you soon…? Donald Glover as Lando in 2018’s Solo. Credit: Disney/Lucasfilm.

Untitled Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

Director: Rian Johnson

Current status: Announced in the wake of The Last Jedi’s release in 2017. Seven years on, and there’s no sign of it actually happening; that Netflix is paying the filmmaker unfeasibly huge sums to make his Knives Out whodunit movies likely means any Rian Johnson-directed Star Wars film is likely to be years away. “He is unbelievably busy,” Kathleen Kennedy admitted to Variety in 2023. “So we’re not actively involved in anything at the moment because he’s doing another one of the Glass Onion movies and then God knows what else.”

Read more: Star Wars | The ultimate poisoned chalice for film directors?

The First Jedi

Director(s): David Benioff and DB Weiss

Current status: The Game Of Thrones showrunners signed a deal with Lucasfilm to make a trilogy of prequels in 2018, starting with a movie called The First Jedi. As its name implies, it would have been a prequel about the birth of the Jedi order; in January 2024, Benioff and Weiss revealed that those plans were dead. “We weren’t the droids they were looking for,” they said.

Another Jedi Origins Movie

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Current status: Scrapped. Lucasfilm has clearly wanted to make a Jedi origins movie for some time now, but hasn’t found a script it’s happy with. Screenwriter David S Goyer revealed in 2023 that he’d written a script “that took place 25,000 years before the first Star Wars film” about four years earlier, and that Guillermo del Toro was in talks to direct. For reasons unclear, this was scrapped, along with Benioff and Weiss’s own origins movie (see above). 

Guillermo del Toro almost directed a star wars movie
Who wouldn’t want to see a Guillermo del Toro Star Wars movie? Lucasfilm, seemingly.

Dawn Of The Jedi

Director: James Mangold

Current status: Lucasfilm now appears to be going ahead with Mangold and co-writer Beau Willimon’s latest, ‘Ten Commandments’ -inspired Jedi origins concept. Or is it? There was a recent report going around that Mangold plans to start shooting Dawn Of The Jedi next year, though a quote from the director confirming this hasn’t emerged at the time of writing. 

Another untitled sequel trilogy

Director: Unknown

Current status: News of this one emerged in November 2024. Little’s known about it – to the point where outlets reporting on it can’t quite agree whether it’s a sequel trilogy, continuing on from 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker, or whether it’s something separate. Simon Kinberg, co-creator of Star Wars: Rebels (among other things) is said to be writing the scripts.


Of the movies listed here, Dawn Of The Jedi sounds as though it’s more likely to go into production than most. Or maybe Daisy Ridley’s New Jedi Order movie will get moving after all; the actor recently told Collider, “Things are evolving. I continue to be very excited. There will be an update soon.” (Screenwriter Steven Knight left a day or so after she was quoted as saying this; we’re sure that isn’t the update she was referring to.)

For now, The Mandalorian And Grogu is the only Star Wars movie we can say with any certainty will appear on the big screen. And by the time it emerges in 2026, the franchise will have been absent from cinemas for almost seven years – a gap even longer than the one that sat between James Bond movies Licence To Kill (1989) and GoldenEye (1995). 

In Bond’s case, the franchise was hampered by a set of wider problems outside of its studio’s control; Lucasfilm, by contrast, appears to have been struck by a crisis of confidence after that aggressive run of films in the second half of the 2010s. 

Unnerved by slowing ticket sales, and seemingly cowed by a hard-to-please fanbase, the firm’s fractiousness over its own output is such that even a concept that sounds foolproof – Rogue Squadron is basically Top Gun in space – has failed to coalesce.

What’s strange to contemplate is that all of the projects listed above would have required a considerable amount of time and money. Screenwriters must have spent months if not longer writing drafts, taking notes and revising those drafts. This isn’t necessarily unusual in Hollywood, but then consider that the fantastical nature of the Star Wars universe also requires the design of all kinds of creatures, weapons and spacecraft, all drawn, painted or otherwise rendered by a legion of artists. The amount of words and artwork, bound up in non-disclosure agreements or otherwise locked up in hard drives or on shelves, must be considerable by now.

The saga continues, of course, on the small screen and in other media. Cinematically, however, Lucasfilm has managed to perfect the art of announcing Star Wars movies but not actually making them. 

Star Wars: The Mandalorian And Grogu is scheduled for release on the 22nd May 2026.

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