The Stranger Things creative and Free Guy director Shawn Levy is taking the reins of yet another Star Wars project for Lucasfilm.
It’s that time again.
It has been announced via Deadline that yet another Star Wars film is in development, this one under the stewardship of Shawn Levy.
Levy has been involved with some of the industry’s biggest productions of the last few years, having produced Stranger Things (and helmed a few episodes too) since the very beginning, not to mention directing splashy features such as Free Guy and Netflix’s The Adam Project. Oh, and there’s the small matter of him helming the third Deadpool movie that has been grabbing all of the headlines of late, since it was announced that Hugh Jackman would be returning to reprise the role of Wolverine once more.
Little is known about Levy’s Star Wars project and no writer is yet attached. Reportedly, work on this one won’t even begin until Deadpool 3 is done so don’t expect to see this one for a good few years, if at all.
Lucasfilm has developed an unfortunate habit over the last few years of prematurely announcing Star Wars movie projects that either sit in suspended animation or simply don’t come to pass. As such, Levy’s project joins those supposedly being led by Patty Jenkins, Kevin Feige, Taika Waititi and Rian Johnson, as well as the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy/Damon Lindelof feature we’ve been hearing a bit about lately. Of all of those projects though, only the latter seems to have any real sense of traction.
At best, you can charitably describe most of the plans above as ‘long-gestating’ and fans of A Galaxy Far, Far Away have become depressingly used to reports of a new film surfacing, only for them to fritter away to nothing. That’s certainly what seems to have happened to the Star Wars project that JD Dillard, the director of the upcoming dogfight movie, Devotion was working on.
Dillard’s father was a pilot and it seems that his interest in aviation movies extended beyond the upcoming Devotion, with the director hinting to The Wrap that his pitched Star Wars project may have been based around the Empire’s TIE Fighter pilots. “My dad being an aviator, we had a bunch of flight simulators”, he explained. I’m playing [Tie Fighter] for months. And my dad’s flying it with me. And I’m like, man, this game is just so cool. And he’s like, well, you know, this game comes from a series of movies … that is where I watched Star Wars for the first time and realised the full scope of what it meant to world build because I’d been playing this pseudo-16-bit game”.
Whilst that’s far from a confirmation of what could have been, you can easily envisage a world where Dillard’s potential TIE Fighter project could have released as a companion piece to complement Patty Jenkins’ planned Rogue Squadron film, perhaps on Disney+ as a series. Either way, the filmmaker has confirmed that the project is “unfortunately no longer a thing… it was not for lack of trying”.
We haven’t seen a new Star Wars film now since 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker and there are no immediate film projects on Lucasfilm’s release schedule. Until something concrete finally goes into production, Star Wars fans will continue to content themselves with some of the smaller screen Disney+ fare such as the excellent Andor which is earning good reviews as its first series draws to an end.
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