Star Wars | Multiple productions are vying to feature Daisy Ridley’s Rey, says new report

Star Wars Rey
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Lucasfilm wants to continue Rey’s story, as played by Daisy Ridley, with parallel Star Wars productions said to be writing plots around her character.


The Star Wars franchise has been a familiar enough sight on TV over the past five years, thanks to such shows as The Mandalorian and Andor. As we’ve recently explored, Lucasfilm is on shakier ground in cinemas, having been away from the big screen since 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker.

Lucasfilm is evidently keen to continue the story of Rey, though, with actor Daisy Ridley set to reprise her role in a film directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Reportedly called New Jedi Order, that film is said to feature a more seasoned Rey, now the mentor to a new generation of trainee Jedi.

More recently, however, writer-producer Simon Kinberg was announced as the creative figure behind a new Star Wars trilogy, which will reportedly bring back Rey as an Obi-Wan-esque figure – a remarkably similar concept to the one Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is said to be working on.

All of which might imply there are at least two projects in the works at Lucasfilm that are vying to tell the story of the same character – something backed up by a new piece published by The Hollywood Reporter. Its sources appear to back up journalist Jeff Sneider’s report that Kinberg’s early-in-gestation trilogy will reintroduce Rey, and raises the question of whether it’s potentially on a “collision course” with Obaid-Chinoy’s film.

The problem, according to the report, is that Lucasfilm regards Rey as its “most valuable cinematic asset” – perhaps even “the only one” Star Wars currently has. An older generation of characters have either been killed off or quietly retired, while Lucasfilm is already capitalising on the success of Din Djarin on the small screen with its upcoming spin-off movie The Mandalorian And Grogu.

Read more: Star Wars | Lucasfilm is exceptionally good at not making movies

“The closet is a little bare,” a source told THR. (It could be argued that such characters as Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) became somewhat underused as the sequel trilogy wore on – for whatever reason, Lucasfilm seems less interested in continuing their stories.)

(Not Cameron Poe as we wrote earlier today. Apologies to Nic Cage for our previous typo – Ed.)

There’s also a hint of chaos behind the scenes according to the report, with multiple writers and directors all working on projects that could potentially overlap. “They are not related but whatever one were to come out first could, in a domino effect, then impact the one after it,” journalist Borys Kit writes.

From an outsider’s perspective, it’s unclear whether some of this is intentional: that Lucasfilm has certain areas of the Star Wars universe it wants to explore, and then sets multiple writers to work on those concepts and waits to see which it prefers. At least a couple of filmmaking groups have worked on a Jedi origins movie, for example, and it currently looks a though James Mangold’s Dawn Of The Jedi, co-written by Beau Willimon, is close to actually going into production.

If the stories are accurate, then Simon Kinberg is the latest filmmaker to take on the task of continuing Rey’s story. There have been reports that Obaid-Chinoy’s project is on hold, and that writer Steven Knight has moved on to other things.

It all sounds rather odd, and is a sharp contrast with Marvel’s more regimented approach to planning out its cinematic universe in phases. “It’s a different way of development,” a Lucasfilm insider told THR. “There’s so much parallel work going on.”

The Mandalorian And Grogu is due for release in 2026, with another Star Wars movie scheduled for that December. Tellingly, perhaps, Lucasfilm hasn’t announced what the latter film is even called.

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