Star Wars giveth, and Star Wars taketh away. Just when it looks like we might finally get a new Star Wars movie, with rumors that Shawn Levy is developing his own film set in the galaxy far, far away, comes a report that a previously reported Star Wars movie has bit the proverbial space dust.
This project was first revealed back in February of 2020. At the time, we learned that director J.D. Dillard, whose previous projects include Sleight and Sweetheart, was working on an unspecified Star Wars movie with writer Matt Owens. That was just about all that ever got out about the movie, but whatever it was supposed to be it never happened — and it’s not going to happen.
In an interview with TheWrap, Dillard says his Star Wars is “unfortunately no longer a thing,” although “not for lack of trying.”
He wouldn’t reveal the specifics of the project, beyond describing his love of flying and the old Star Wars computer game TIE Fighter:
My dad being an aviator, we had a bunch of flight simulators … I’m playing this game [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.’ And I was like, ‘You’re kidding me.’ That is where I watched ‘Star Wars’ for the first time and realized the full scope of what it meant to world build because I’d been playing this pseudo-16-bit game.
If Dillard was going to direct a movie inspired by or rooted in TIE Fighter that would make two similar Star Wars projects that were proposed, developed, and basically abandoned around that same time. In December 2020, Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins was brought in to direct a Rogue Squadron movie, an aviator-based Star Wars movie about heroic Rebel pilots. Though that project may not technically dead, it appears to be stuck in development hell, and is no longer on Disney’s upcoming release calendar.
We’ll instead have to hope that Levy, or maybe Damon Lindelof, can finally figure out how to break through with a new Star Wars movie after years of unsuccessful attempts from numerous directors and writers. J.D. Dillard’s new movie, Devotion, opens in theaters on November 23.
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