In a move akin to simply throwing their arms up in the air and proclaiming “to hell with this,” Lucasfilm and Disney have confirmed that the next entry in the Star Wars franchise would not break away into new territory as had been repeatedly promised, but instead simply continue the story of the much-maligned “sequel trilogy” by focusing on none other than Daisy Ridley’s Rey. On Friday, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy made the announcement at Star Wars Celebration in London, saying that director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel) would head up the film, which would reportedly focus on “Rey Skywalker” as she sets about building a new Jedi Order, as Luke once tried to do. Obaid-Chinoy would become the first woman and first person of color to direct a Star Wars movie in the process–the Pakistani director has won two Academy Awards for documentary short, for 2011’s Saving Face and 2015’s A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. More recently, she directed two episodes of Ms. Marvel on Disney+.
The choice to simply return to the end of the “Skywalker Saga,” however, is a move that feels particularly motivated by Disney’s seeming inability to guide other Star Wars projects to their conclusion, and not a move that will be hailed by many fans. The sequel trilogy started out on a high note, with the thrilling but extremely derivative The Force Awakens, before ultimately cratering in the rushed Rise of Skywalker, which attempted to seemingly wrap up an entire trilogy’s worth of plot in one movie, while vehemently opposing the contributions made by Rian Johnson on The Last Jedi. At the time, we wrote that it was ultimately a total lack of planning that killed the Star Wars brand, and we stand by that argument today.
Little, if any of this is the fault of Daisy Ridley, an actress who gracefully embodied Rey as the next big Star Wars protagonist. She did what she could to serve as a face of the franchise, but the dramatically clashing films by Abrams and Johnson unraveled any momentum that her trilogy tried to generate.
Since the release of Rise of Skywalker in 2019, the mainline Star Wars feature film series has effectively been frozen in carbonite, with all the attention moved to increasingly ill-received TV series, with the notable exception of Andor. Each planned Star Wars feature has ultimately fallen apart–including the project that became this Rey movie, which was originally supposed to be written by Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson, before now being passed to Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders). A Kevin Feige project was announced in 2019, and wasn’t officially canned until May 2022, when it was shelved. Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins likewise was announced as directing the first feature following Rise of Skywalker, the space dogfight epic Rogue Squadron, but that project was also shelved in 2023 following years of zero progress. Director Taika Waititi is supposedly still working on directing a Star Wars feature in which he would direct and star, but at this point it’s hard to believe in any Star Wars project until it’s actually shooting.
And so, we end up back where we started, with Daisy Ridley and Rey. Perhaps Obaid-Chinoy will be the perfect steward for the character, and will allow us to see a new side of the Star Wars universe, free from Disney IP meddling? Or does it seem more likely that the film will just be a series of cameos from Skywalker Saga characters, with fan sites endlessly theorizing on the availability of John Boyega, Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac, etc? Sadly, we know which seems more likely to us.