When the news broke that Damon Lindelof had been tapped to write the New Jedi Order movie revolving around Daisy Ridley's Rey, excitement for the project among Star Wars fans immediately increased.
Between Lost, Watchmen, and Prometheus, Lindelof had proven himself an expert at tackling genre fare, and Star Wars fans had plenty of reasons to be intrigued by what his take on this Galaxy Far, Far Away would look like. Unfortunately, as was so often the case during Kathleen Kennedy's time as Lucasfilm President, creative differences eventually got in the way.
The Rey movie has since been through multiple writers and appears no closer to actually becoming a reality. Lindelof, meanwhile, has moved on to another cosmic project, as one of the main writers on DC Studios and HBO's Lanterns.
In an interview with The Ringer-Verse (via SFFGazette.com), Lindelof reflected on his plans for this Star Wars movie, saying it would have been akin to "the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars."
He explained, "Just to talk about the Bantha in the room, I was fired off of a Star Wars movie. 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. And so I was wrong. At least through that prism."
"But what we were attempting to do — my partners Justin Britt-Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I — what we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say, there is a Force of nostalgia, and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another," Lindelof continued. "And let's do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. And it didn't work."
"You have your cake and eat it too, but the conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, and that didn't feel necessarily that risky," he added, saying that while Lucasfilm "seemed to like the premise," the "writing was really hard" and "slow."
"The tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode 9. Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things, they're so massive. They're so big," Lindelof said, seemingly confirming that the idea was to fully shift the spotlight to Rey, Finn, and Poe Dameron.
"We got the sense that when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the centre of Star Wars," he mused. "The new question is, are Mando and Grogu the centre of Star Wars now?"
Dave Filoni is now in charge of Lucasfilm, and we've yet to see what his vision for the franchise looks like. Nothing has been announced for theaters beyond next summer's Star Wars: Starfighter, and Ahsoka Season 2 is currently the only TV series coming to Disney+.
Beyond that, it seems the future is fluid, and we'd bet on Filoni's plans coming into focus when Star Wars Celebration heads to Los Angeles next April.