After years in development limbo, the fate of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars trilogy has been revealed. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Johnson confirms that plans for his Star Wars trilogy are “effectively dead,” though Johnson leaves the door open for a future return to the franchise.
“A part of my brain will always be in Star Wars,” Johnson says. “It’s so much a part of me and the way I think.”
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Director Rian Johnson breaks down his reaction to the online criticism lobbed at The Last Jedi while recalling his own Prequel Trilogy hate.
Johnson wrote and directed 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the second installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which was as critically praised as it was divisive among Star Wars fans for its iconoclastic treatment of Star Wars lore and traditions. That same year, Lucasfilm announced Johnson would develop a standalone Star Wars trilogy, separate and disconnected from the Skywalker saga.
Johnson’s project never moved past the conceptual stage. Instead, Johnson chose to step away from Star Wars to pursue future installments of the Knives Out series, which has been the entirety of his cinematic output since then.
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Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Legacy
Image via Jules Heath /© Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / © Lucasfilm Ltd. /Courtesy Everett Collection
With his Star Wars trilogy seemingly scrapped for good, Star Wars: The Last Jedi will remain Johnson’s sole mark on the Star Wars universe. It’s good then that he can still look back so fondly on the experience.
“We made that movie in this beautiful, fearless little bubble, and the reality is, once you dive in and start doing the creative work, there isn’t a lot of room in your head for the notion of external pressure,” Johnson says.
But things can change once the creative bubble bursts and the film is shown to the public. The reaction to Star Wars: The Last Jedi changed the way Johnson interacts with the public.
“Before I made the Star Wars movie, when I was very, very active on Twitter, if someone said anything mean about me, I felt like I had to fix that,” Johnson says. “Having grown up as a Star Wars fan, I think the love and the hate are two sides of the same coin, and it’s all passion for what the thing is. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with when it’s coming at you in a personal way.”
Johnson is hardly the only high-profile filmmaker to have a Star Wars movie announced only for it to fizzle out in the early stages of development. Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff had a Star Wars film go into development around the same time as Johnson’s trilogy, and it too was later abandoned, reportedly due to scheduling difficulties. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige was developing a Star Wars movie in 2019, but that project has since been abandoned as Feige has refocused his attention on the struggling MCU.
Most recently, news surfaced about a film titled The Hunt for Ben Solo. The film has the dubious distinction of being the only Star Wars film to have a working script and not enter production. Reports suggest that Disney executives couldn’t envision a movie where Ben Solo returns after he died in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Released
November 11, 2019
ESRB
m
Developer(s)
Respawn Entertainment
Publisher(s)
Respawn Entertainment
Engine
Unreal Engine 4.