‘Star Wars: Rogue Squadron’ Is Back On Again According To Director Patty Jenkins
by Erik Amaya
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is now the most intriguing Star Wars story, but not for anything in the story itself.
According to Deadline, film director Patty Jenkins — announced to helm the film in 2020 — told the TCM/Max podcast that the project, long assumed abandoned, is back on. Although the film was scheduled for a 2023 release, it fell by the wayside when Jenkins was called away to develop a third Wonder Woman film. “When I left Star Wars to do Wonder Woman 3 , I thought maybe I’ll come back to Star Wars after Wonder Woman 3. So, we did a deal for that to happen, started a deal,” she explained. “When [Wonder Woman 3] went away, Lucasfilm and I were like, ‘oh, we gotta finish this deal.’ We finished the deal right as the strike was happening. So I now owe a draft of Star Wars and so we will see what happens there. You know, like, who knows?”
Her caution at the end betrays the other reason Rogue Squadron fell by the wayside, Lucasfilm’s inconsistent direction toward feature films in the wake of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Disney’s push for material to appear on the Disney+ streaming service. In the pandemic years, the company has provided three seasons of The Mandalorian, and a season each of Andor, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Ahsoka — not the mention the unrelated Willow television series Disney ultimately cancelled and pulled from the service — with two more Star Wars series ready to debut sometime this year.
In the interim, the film side of Star Wars has been littered with projects from Three Body Problem producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, Thor: Ragnarok‘s Taika Waititi, and others that either fell into a development black hole or were cancelled outright.
Currently, four films are in the works from Jon Favreau, James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy — the final project being a “New Jedi Order” film to feature Daisy Ridley as an older and wiser Rey from the Sequel trilogy. It is unclear where Rogue Squadron would fit into this scheme or even if any of them will happen beyond Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, a project presumably taking the place of a fourth Mandalorian season.
Nevertheless, Jenkins comments caused surprise among watchers of Lucasfilm’s movements as Rogue Squadron was “shelved indefinitely” sometime before the current slate of projects was announced. We hope Jenkins will have the opportunity to bring her tale of fighter pilots to fruition, though, as it has the potential to be a unique tale in the generally interconnected Star Wars universe.
