We Finally Have An Update About Rian Johnson's Star Wars Trilogy
Rumors of the death of Rian Johnson's Star Wars trilogy have been greatly exaggerated.
Johnson wrote and directed the controversial Star Wars film The Last Jedi, the second film in the third trilogy, which hit theaters in 2017 and became very polarizing among fans. Shortly before the release of The Last Jedi, StarWars.com announced that Johnson would be creating a new film trilogy and would write and direct the first film in the series himself.
"We all loved working with Rian on The Last Jedi," Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said at the time. "He's a creative force, and watching him craft The Last Jedi from start to finish was one of the great joys of my career. Rian will do amazing things with the blank canvas of this new trilogy." The new trilogy was to come after the completion of the Skywalker Saga, and explore a previously unseen corner of the universe.
Sounds pretty exciting, right? Rian Johnson. Fresh trilogy. Lucasfilm onboard. Except, after that announcement we got a whole bunch of radio silence.
A lot changed after The Last Jedi, in all fairness to Lucasfilm. Johnson's film got mired in toxic fan wars, Solo and The Rise of Skywalker underperformed creatively and at the box office, and the Star Wars franchise shifted its focus to TV after the huge success of The Mandalorian. The movies are currently on a very intentional hiatus. The next Star Wars movie is slated to be released on December 22, 2023, though it's publicly unknown at this point which of the many rumored Star Wars movies in development it will be, per Collider.
It probably won't be Johnson's movie, but Johnson's trilogy is still in the works. Johnson reportedly said so in an interview with author Sariah Wilson.
Rian Johnson's trilogy is happening ... someday
Wilson said on Twitter that Johnson told her during an as-yet-unpublished interview that he was still working on Star Wars. "Yes, Rian's SW trilogy is still on," Wilson wrote. "No dates or timelines because he has other projects going on, but it is happening."
"THAT IS ALL I KNOW ABOUT IT," she added, with three smiley emojis for emphasis.
This is the first acknowledgement of Johnson's trilogy in some time. In a 2019 interview with Observer, Johnson said he was still figuring out exactly what the new story would be. "We're doing something that steps beyond the legacy characters," he said. "What does that look like? To me, the blue sky element of it is what was most striking about it. I know the way that I'm coming at it and what's fun about it for everyone in Lucasfilm is figuring out, 'what's the next step?' It really makes you think and figure out what the essence of Star Wars is for me and what that will look like moving forward."
Around the same time Johnson's trilogy was announced, Lucasfilm also announced a trilogy from controversial Game of Thrones writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. That trilogy, however, is confirmed to be canceled, with Benioff and Weiss stepping away to develop projects for Netflix.