Announced six years ago, director Taika Waititi’s Star Wars film is now “on ice”, he says, adding that he’s moving on to other projects. It was billed as the film that would attempt to recapture the ‘fun’ and 'joy’ of the original Star Wars trilogy. But it’s been just under six years since Thor: Love ... Star Wars | Taika Waititi’s long-in-the-works project is “on ice”
Announced six years ago, director Taika Waititi’s Star Wars film is now “on ice”, he says, adding that he’s moving on to other projects.
It was billed as the film that would attempt to recapture the ‘fun’ and 'joy’ of the original Star Wars trilogy. But it’s been just under six years since Thor: Love And Thunder director Taika Waititi’s entry in the Star Wars universe was announced, and it now looks as though it will never happen.
The untitled project is, Waititi has said, “on ice,” with the filmmaker now working on other projects instead.
Waititi’s untitled film was announced during Disney’s Investor Day in 2020, and was one of a dozen Lucasverse items introduced by then-boss Kathleen Kennedy. Since then, updates had been vague and sporadic; Kennedy said in 2023 that “Taika is working away on this. He’s just… slow. We’ve got a couple of acts, we need a third.”
The script was at one stage going to be written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns; later, Poor Things screenwriter Tony McNamara was brought in to work on it instead. In interviews, Waititi often said that his take on Star Wars would be a self-contained story with a light-hearted tone.
“The stakes are very high, and there’s serious things going on, but there’s a lot of fun to be had in those [original trilogy] films,” he said in 2023. “That’s what I’m trying to bring back.”
Lucasfilm, at least under Disney, has something of a track record when it comes to developing Star Wars projects that never get made, however, and Waititi has spent the past few years working on other things. There was Thor: Love And Thunder in 2022, the football comedy Next Goal Wins the following year, and now he has an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s gentle sci-fi novel, Klara And The Sun in cinemas.
It was on the press trail for that latter film – which has received mixed reviews so far – that Waititi told Inverse about the fate of his Star Wars entry.
“I hate to break this to you,” Waititi said, “but we’re going to actually put it on ice and we [he and McNamara are] working on a different thing together.”
Kathleen Kennedy stepped down as Lucasfilm president in early 2026, and her replacements are Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan. On TV, the Star Wars franchise has been bubbling along nicely with shows like The Mandalorian and Andor.
In cinemas, it’s been on wobblier ground, with a seven-year gap between The Rise Of Skywalker and 2026’s film spin-off The Mandalorian And Grogu, the latter becoming the lowest-grossing Star Wars film of the Disney era.
The studio could really do with a Star Wars film that lands with audiences; next year’s Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling, directed by Shawn Levy and timed to coincide with the franchise’s 50th anniversary, may be that film.
As for Waititi’s Star Wars, he told Inverse, “Ice ages do come to an end. Who knows?”.
More on all this as it comes in.
