Damon Lindelof has said he was fired from a planned Star Wars film after spending two years developing a story that would have explored a battle between “nostalgia” and “revision” within the franchise.
In an appearance on The Ringer’s House of R podcast, the Lost creator talked about why his vision for the franchise ultimately “didn’t work”.
“I was fired off of a Star Wars movie,” he said. “They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong, at least through that prism.”
Lindelof said the screenplay, which he worked on with Into the Badlands writer Justin Britt-Gibson and Deadly Class writer Rayna McClendon, wanted to address the ideological divide within the Star Wars fanbase over whether the franchise should preserve familiar mythology or move in a radically new direction.
“What we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a Force of nostalgia and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars, and it didn’t work,” said the Watchmen showrunner.
“You have your cake and eat it too. The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
In 2022, reports emerged that Lindelof was co-writing a Star Wars film with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. The film was believed to focus on Rey after the events of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, with Daisy Ridley expected to reprise the role.
However, it was reported in March 2023 that Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson had exited the project and had been replaced by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. The project was formally announced by Lucasfilm at Star Wars Celebration in London in April 2023, where Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said the story would take place 15 years after The Rise of Skywalker and would follow Rey as she attempted to rebuild the Jedi Order.
Knight later also departed the project in 2024, with screenwriter George Nolfi reportedly brought on to write a new version of the screenplay in January 2025. The film remains in development.
However, Lindelof suggested the project ultimately stalled not because of objections to its premise but because of the difficulties of shaping a new Star Wars story after 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, which concluded Disney’s sequel trilogy.
The sequel trilogy consisted of The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017), and The Rise of Skywalker, and centred on a new generation of characters including Rey, Finn, and Poe Dameron while also bringing back legacy characters such as Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Han Solo from George Lucas’s original trilogy.
“They seemed to like the premise,” Lindelof said of Lucasfilm executives. “It was just the writing was really hard. It was slow. The tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode IX. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it all of those things? They’re so massive.”
He compared the development process to steering “a tanker”, adding: “You turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit like this.”
The Independent has reached out to LucasFilm for comment.
Lindelof said one of the central problems facing the franchise was uncertainty over what and who now forms the narrative core of Star Wars.
“When episode seven came out, we all knew what it was,” he said, referring to The Force Awakens. “It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we were migrating back in Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys.
“But we got the sense that when this new trilogy was over we were going to be launching with these new characters and that was the centre of Star Wars,” he continued.
“The new question is: are Mando and Grogu the centre of Star Wars now?” he asked about Din Djarin, the masked bounty hunter played by Pedro Pascal, and Grogu, the Force-sensitive alien widely known as Baby Yoda, from Disney+ series The Mandalorian.
The Mandalorian debuted in 2019 as the streaming platform’s first live-action Star Wars series and became one of the franchise’s biggest recent successes, particularly through the popularity of Grogu. Created by Jon Favreau, the series follows Din Djarin, a lone bounty hunter navigating the galaxy after the fall of the Empire.
Lucasfilm later confirmed that the show’s story would continue on the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars film to receive a theatrical release since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.
In a two-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey described it as “the dullest and most inconsequential Star Wars ever made”.
The Mandalorian and Grogu will be released in theatres on 22 May.
