Vanity Fair Article on future Star Wars Projects

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All this led to “the hiatus,” a fallow spot in the Star Wars film landscape that Kennedy announced in early 2019, months before The Rise of Skywalker even debuted. Lucasfilm needed to regroup and rethink: “We all recognized, every single one of us, that this was a new chapter for the company and that we needed to all work together to create the architecture for where we were going.”

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The 2018 movie Solo explored Han Solo’s younger years, with Alden Ehrenreich taking on the role of the smuggler originated by Harrison Ford. The film has its admirers, but it made less at the box office than any other live-action Star Wars movie. Solo’s swagger may be too singular for another actor to replicate. “There should be moments along the way when you learn things,” says Kennedy. “Now it does seem so abundantly clear that we can’t do that.”

To endure, Star Wars will need new actors, new characters, and a new era, vaulting away from the timeline as we know it. Another upcoming series, The Acolyte, reportedly starring Amandla Stenberg, aims to do that.

The Acolyte, Headland says, takes place roughly 100 years before The Phantom Menace: “A lot of those characters haven’t even been born yet. We’re taking a look at the political and personal and spiritual things that came up in a time period that we don’t know much about. My question when watching The Phantom Menace was always like, ‘Well, how did things get to this point?’ How did we get to a point where a Sith lord can infiltrate the Senate and none of the Jedi pick up on it? Like, what went wrong? What are the scenarios that led us to this moment?”

Headland describes The Acolyte as a mystery thriller set in a prosperous and seemingly peaceful era, when the galaxy is still sleek and glistening. “We actually use the term the Renaissance, or the Age of Enlightenment,” she says. Jedis were not always ascetic monklike figures living selflessly and bravely. “The Jedi uniforms are gold and white, and it’s almost like they would never get dirty. They would never be out and about,” Headland says. “The idea is that they could have these types of uniforms because that’s how little they’re getting into skirmishes.”

Another new series on the horizon doesn’t even have a title, just a code name: Grammar Rodeo, a reference to an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart and his schoolmates steal a car and run away for a week, using a phony educational event as an alibi. The show takes place during the post–Return of the Jedi reconstruction that follows the fall of the Empire, the same as The Mandalorian, but its plot remains a secret. It’s created and executive-produced by director Jon Watts and writer Chris Ford, who made Spider-Man: Homecoming for Marvel. A casting notice has called for four children, around 11 to 12 years old. Inside Lucasfilm, the show is being described as a galactic version of classic Amblin coming-of-age adventure films of the ’80s.

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"We have a road map,” Kennedy says, although Lucasfilm’s big-screen return is unlikely to follow the same relentless cadence as before. A movie from Jojo Rabbit’s Taika Waititi and 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns will likely arrive first, with Rogue Squadron from Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins further off. Is it true that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige will produce a Star Wars film? “I would love to see what movie he might come up with,” Kennedy says. “But right now, no, there isn’t anything specifically.” And the trilogy from The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson that was announced five years ago? Back-burnered. “Rian has been unbelievably busy with Knives Out and the deal that he made at Netflix for multiple movies.”

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