A new report suggests that, yet again, Lucasfilm’s Star Wars plans have fallen into disarray, with a new delay on the horizon.
Here we go again.
A report has emerged over at World of Reel which claims that the next major installment in the Star Wars cinematic series is going to be further delayed. Just to be clear, this is the film that definitely stars Daisy Ridley who will return as Rey in a film directed by Ms Marvel's Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.
Furthermore, this isn’t the same delay that we covered back in October of last year. That delay pushed the film’s scheduled shoot date back from April of this year, with the aim being that cameras could roll by September. Of the many, many pushbacks that have plagued the Star Wars films since Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, that one was the most understandable. After all, six months of strike action meant that lots of projects were rescheduling and having to look for new production windows.
According to the outlet, creative differences are once again causing problems in moving things forward, though.
Steven Knight has reportedly turned in his draft for the film and Lucasfilm ‘gave him so many notes that he had to start from scratch.’ It goes on to say that instead, Knight has elected to put his energies into the script for his Peaky Blinders movie (and doesn’t he have a Vertigo script to get on with too?) so there’s a real chance that he might simply exit the project, leaving Lucasfilm back at square one with the project.
Unfortunately, this is not an unfamiliar position for the studio with this film, given that Damon Lindelof and Justin Brit-Gibson also chose to depart just under a year ago after handing their draft in and getting a similar response from Lucasfilm, which reportedly demanded swathes of changes.
Ironically, the film’s star has been chatting about the film and talking it up, even though it looks like it could be in all sorts of trouble.
Speaking to Allocine, Daisy Ridley had this to say about the project:
“So I thought about it for a little bit, and once I knew what the story was and everything, I knew it was something I really wanted to do. I think it’s a really fantastic exploration of the Star Wars world. It’s a really cool way of taking the story on in a bit of a different direction.”
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As it stands, it has been implied by Lucasfilm that this project (which may or may not be called New Jedi Order) will spearhead a new wave of Star Wars movies. The release date for the film is believed to be May 2026, although if this report is true and a new writer has to be sourced for a page one rewrite, who knows whether it can still make that date.
There’s more too.
It’s also being suggested that the recent announcement of a film featuring fan favourites, The Mandalorian and Grogu was made public to be positioned as the ‘next’ Star Wars movie because the Daisy Ridley one is being delayed ‘indefinitely’.
Should that prove to be the case, then it suggests that Lucasfilm is pretty much figuring things out on the fly – not the best way to operate a company with such prominent visibility, we’d argue.
As it stands, this is very much an unconfirmed story, but when you consider the way Lucasfilm has repeatedly bungled the handling of these projects over the past few years, it’s all too easy to believe. You can read our history of Star Wars’ mismanagement under Disney here.
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