Damon Lindelof On His Scrapped Star Wars Film
The Watchmen co-creator talks about his Rey-centric spin-off that was cancelled.
Damon Lindelof has discussed his cancelled Rey-led film as part of the Star Wars‘ sequel trilogy, which began in 2015 with The Force Awakens, followed by 2017’s The Last Jedi and concluded with 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. Directed by J.J Abrams and Rian Johnson, this is the follow-up trilogy to the original trilogy, which consists of A New Hope from 1977, The Empire Strikes Back from 1980 and Return of the Jedi from 1983.
The sequel trilogy narrates Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, as she joins the Resistance’s fight against the First Order and learns the ways of the Force under the guidance of the original trilogy’s characters. Lindelof was due to pen the script for a New Jedi Order film involving Rey, yet was let go from the Lucasfilm project in 2023.
During a podcast interview, the screenwriter confirmed directly that he “was fired off of a Star Wars movie.”
“So, 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,'” Lindelof shared specifically. “And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong, at least through that time.”
Lindelof then cited a familiar, challenging conflict of interest which plagues any media from decades ago still being revamped for contemporary releases in this day and age: old school lore and new ideas butting heads, as the source of the cancellation.
“What we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie,” he said, “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.”
This is evident to fans as the 2010s films situated newcomers for the new generation of fans, Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo Ren, alongside beloved, iconic oldheads Luke and Leia (the Skywalker twins), Hans and Chewbacca. The latter gang exist as some of film history’s most iconic figures, a huge pressure cooker when creating new faces and stories, which is only the tip of the iceberg.
Lindelof’s work would have addressed this conflict between eras head-on, a vision which “didn’t work” for Lucasfilm.
“And so you get —you have your cake and eat it too, but the conversation that the fandom is having without winking and looking at the audience…that didn’t necessarily feel that risky,” Lindelof shared. “It was just that the writing was really hard. It was slow.”
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