Lost producer Damon Lindelof has revealed a lot more information about his scrapped Star Wars movie, and it sounds like a pretty new approach to the beloved franchise.
Lindelof was attached to the long-gestating Rey movie, directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, but he ultimately exited the project in 2023.
"Just to talk about the bantha in the room, I was fired off of a Star Wars movie," Lindelof shared on an episode of The Ringer-Verse, as part of a longer conversation on Star Wars. "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.
"But what we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, and Raina McClendon, and I, what we were attempting to do, was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a force of nostalgia, and there is a force of revision, and they are at odds with one another," he explained. "And let's do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. And it didn't work."
He added that the movie would have had "the conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience."
Lindelof went on to say that "they seemed to like the premise," but he thinks the issue was "the writing was really hard. It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode 9 [The Rise of Skywalker]. Is it starting a new trilogy? Like, all of those things."
He talked more about "looking for the center of Star Wars," saying that, when The Force Awakens released, "it was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe, and then we were migrating back in, Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie, 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," he explained. "The new question is, are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars?"
The Mandalorian and Grogu is indeed the next Star Wars movie – the first in seven years – and it arrives this May 22.
In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming Star Wars movies and shows for everything else the galaxy far, far away has in store.
