What happened to Rian Johnson’s Star Wars movies? It was announced shortly after his The Last Jedi came out that Johnson would create his own trilogy of Star Wars films apart from the main Skywalker Saga. But then Johnson went off to do other things — notably Knives Out, which then became a whole series of Benoit Blanc mystery movies — and Star Wars began to focus more and more on TV shows for Disney+ and less on big-screen spectacles.
Johnson has not given up hope that those other Star Wars movies will come out, though. In a new interview with Empire he says they are still on the table, and he discusses them often with Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy:
I’ve stayed close to Kathleen [Kennedy] and we get together often and talk about it … It’s just at this point a matter of schedule and when it can happen. It would break my heart if I were finished, if I couldn’t get back in that sandbox at some point.
In the years since its release, The Last Jedi has been the subject of a (mostly baffling) fan backlash, which could have something to do with the fact that these movies never happened. But Johnson and Lucasfilm are both very busy with other projects as well. I do wonder if some day Johnson’s trilogy of movies will just become an epic TV series for Disney+. That seems to be the way almost everything in the Star Wars galaxy is going these days; at the present, we still don’t know definitively when the next Star Wars movie will come out, or what its subject will be.
In the meantime, Johnson’s new film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, premieres on Netflix on December 23.
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