Disney Removes Patty Jenkins’ ‘Star Wars: Rogue Squadron’ From Release Schedule
It’s been almost two years since Lucasfilm officially announced a new Star Wars movie was going into production. That was back in December of 2020, when they unveiled Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, a movie about the famous group of X-wing pilots that was to be directed by Wonder Woman filmmaker Patty Jenkins.
The project was announced with great fanfare at Disney’s Investor Day presentation that year. Jenkins herself posted this glossy video hyping the project and her love of the material and subject matter on her Twitter account, saying she “grew up the daughter of a great fighter pilot, and every day I would wake up and go outside and look up and see my father and his squadron taking off in their F-4s roaring across the sky, and it was the most thrilling thing still I’ve experienced in my entire life.”
She said when her father passed away it “ignited a desire” in her to turn that tragedy and the thrill she felt into “the greatest fighter pilot movie of all time.” That was supposed to be her Rogue Squadron, which Disney slated for release on December 22, 2023.
That was basically the last time there was any sort of concrete news about the project. Last fall, it was reported that the movie would be delayed due to “scheduling issues on Jenkins’ side.” No further details emerged — until today, when Disney pulled the film from its upcoming release calendar entirely.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the project is completely dead, but it does mean it ain’t coming out in time for Christmas in 2023, and it also means that unless something drastic changes soon, there will not be a new Star Wars movie this year or next, meaning it will have been at least more than four years between Star Wars films in theaters. (The last Star Wars project to make it to the big screen was 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.)
While Star Wars has produced a number of television series for Disney+ in that time, basically every movie project that has been announced in recent years — including a trilogy of movies by Rian Johnson, and a film from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — has gone nowhere. Both Taika Waititi and Marvel’s Kevin Feige are supposedly developing their own Star Wars movies, but neither one has been officially confirmed or given a spot on Disney’s release calendar. This truly is a dark period in the Star Wars galaxy.