Even with a new Star Wars movie opening in theaters this week, the future of the franchise is very much up in the air. Three years after announcing three different films at Star Wars Celebration in 2023, none of them have seen any significant public movement. Odder yet, the two movies that have progressed are completely unrelated. So what’s the deal? Someone who was there, on the inside, has an idea, and it may be why he’s no longer on the inside.
Damon Lindelof, one of the writers behind Lost, Watchmen, the upcoming Lanterns, and more, was recently on House of R to talk about this week’s The Mandalorian and Grogu as well as Star Wars as a whole. Eventually, Lindelof felt the need to address “the bantha in the room,” which was the fact that he was fired from a Star Wars movie. That movie, which would’ve been directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, was believed to be an early iteration of a Rey-centric New Jedi Order story set after the events of The 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. And so I was wrong. At least through that prism,” Lindelof said. “What we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I, was to have this conversation [that he was currently having on the podcast] in the movie, which is to say there is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision and and they are at odds with one another and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars and 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.”
The issue, according to Lindelof, is that there was no clear vision of the movie’s purpose, which slowed things down considerably. So he thinks that had more to do with his firing than anything else.
“I may have been fired, they seem to like the premise, just the writing was really hard. It was slow. The tone. Getting it right. Where it was inside of the canon? What its relationship was with to Episode IX? Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things. They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of the tanker equation which is you turn the wheel and it takes 5 minutes before it turns a little bit like this,” he said.
Lindelof added that the difficulty at this stage, in a world after Episode IX, is finding what he calls “the center of Star Wars. “When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was,” he said. “It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we were migrating back in and Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys. But we got the sense that, when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the center of Star Wars. The new question are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars?”
We can’t answer that question, at least not until next week, and fans vote with their wallets. Plus, Lindelof and the Ringer team discuss it much more on the podcast (which you can watch below). But it does make a lot of sense. There is no center now. Is it Mando and Grogu? Is it Ryan Gosling? Is it still Rey, Finn, and Poe? Those decisions have yet to be made. And until they are, Star Wars fans—Damon Lindelof among them—are going to be trying to figure it out.
Watch the full podcast below. The quotes above come in around the 45 minute mark.
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