At Star Wars Celebration in London last April, Lucasfilm announced that Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold would helm a Star Wars movie focusing on the Galaxy's First Jedi.
That's since been given the working title of Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi and, unlike a long list of other Star Wars projects announced by the studio, it looks like this one might actually happen!
According to The Hollywood Reporter (via SFFGazette.com), Dawn of the Jedi will be penned by House of Cards and Andor scribe Beau Willimon; other noteworthy credits include The Ides of March and The First.
Crucially, Willimon wrote three episodes of the critically acclaimed Andor, including the standout "One Way Out," ending with Andy Serkis' Kino Loy uttering that heartbreaking and now-iconic line, "I can't swim."
The trade explains that Mangold will begin work on Dawn of the Jedi once he finishes shooting his Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet. This has to mean he won't begin work on Swamp Thing for DC Studios until his Star Wars movie is completed (pushing it further down the calendar than we know many of you would like).
Last year, Mangold opened up on what drew him to tell a story set thousands of years before any other Star Wars movie or TV show.
"When I talked to some of the Star Wars clerics that keep track of all of these timelines, I was like 'So when would this happen.' And they were like '25,000 years before Episode I,' and I was like 'Oh, I was looking for some distance, but that’s distance.' I’ll do it, I might find Charlton Heston in an abandoned subway station but I’ll do it."
"The reality for me is that that feeling of space, no pun intended, was something that I felt was really important not to get away from fan service or the intricacies of what George had set up and dreamed of," he continued, "but to just have the space to tell a story and not be instantly encumbered with the bases you have to hit."
"Which, honestly, there’s no way to explain it to folks other than to say it’s like that game we played as kids, 'Twister.' At a certain point, you are in a tangle, because you’re just trying to find ways to tell a story with so many constraints that you can."
Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi doesn't have a confirmed release date, though we don't anticipate seeing it in theaters until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest.