A side effect of Lucasfilm commissioning so many Star Wars projects is that there are now a whole lot of canceled Star Wars projects. Six years ago, the company announced a Rogue Squadron movie directed by Patty Jenkins, only for the project to be shoved to the back burner. Rangers of the New Republic was supposed to be a spinoff of The Mandalorian, but that fell apart, too. At one point, the showrunners of Game of Thrones were developing an entire trilogy, but that was also shelved after the Thrones finale underwhelmed viewers.
Maybe it’s for the best that some of these projects were canceled, but it’s always fascinating to know what could have happened. Now, we finally have some details from one of the most anticipated Star Wars movies that wasn’t meant to be: the one from Lost co-creator and Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof.
During an appearance on The Ringer-Verse podcast, Lindelof spoke about the story he wrote during the two-year window when Lucasfilm hired him to develop a new feature. “Just to talk about the banana in the room. I was fired off of a Star Wars movie,” Lindelof said. “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.”
According to Lindelof, the movie would’ve still followed Rey, Finn, and Poe, but it would have reframed the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. “There is a force of nostalgia, and there is a force of revision, and they are at odds with one another,” he said. “Let's do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars.”
That would have been a significant change for one of the franchise’s most iconic elements, and that reframing is especially interesting in the context of the Star Wars fandom itself. Many fans have pointed out that much of modern Star Wars media is nostalgia-driven, while some shows are trying to popularize new characters. For example, Obi-Wan Kenobi all built up to another Obi-Wan/Vader lightsaber duel, while The Mandalorian has tried to broaden the canon with new characters and storylines.
Lindelof also said that the restrictions of canon made the writing process especially difficult. “The writing was really hard, it was slow,” he said. “Like, the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was with episode 9. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it all of those things?”
We may not have been able to see Lindelof’s vision on the big screen, but he still got his point across. The Star Wars universe is torn between the past and the future, and while nostalgia will always be part of the fandom, we can’t dwell in the past forever.
