The list of directors who’ve been attached to a Star Wars project is long, but the latest might just see their movie actually make it to theatres. It’s been revealed that Jon Watts is to take the reigns of a new trilogy written by Simon Kinberg.
The news of this trilogy came out in November 2024, though up until now, no one has been announced as director. Kinberg himself seems a safe choice, having worked on Star Wars: Rebels, and being a long-time collaborator at 20th Century Fox, with credits on the X-Men films and Fant4stic.
There’s hardly any information on these new films, except they’re expected to be set in the post-Rise of Skywalker era, and continue the main saga, with the first film to be Episode X. It’s my guess that this is just a rework of the long-awaited Rey movie, first announced in 2023, with documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy attached as director. Steven Knight was writing the script for it before he left over the usual “creative differences”, shortly before Kinberg’s new project was revealed. It’s my belief that Lucasfilm wanted Knight to rework his script into a trilogy, possibly with Rey as a less central character, to serve as a starting point for a new era of Star Wars, and he left as a result of this.
Naturally, the news of Jon Watts involvement hasn’t gone down well with a lot of people, but it’s clear why he’s been chosen. He’s a proven director, having delivered three successful Spider-Man films for the MCU, and already has experience in a galaxy far, far away, having created the 2024 Disney+ series Skeleton Crew. Sadly no one watched the show, despite it being one of the better efforts at Star Wars TV.
It’s really his work on Spider-Man that counts the most though. With those films, he successfully incorporated one of Marvel’s most popular characters into the MCU, building a new version of the character, and managing to stay out of Sam Raimi’s shadow for the most part. He actually did a pretty good job of working his films into the existing MCU, while still keeping some independence and originality. With No Way Home, he dropped a hugely successful nostalgia bomb, by incorporating Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s characters into the movie, making nearly $2 billion.
Lucasfilm may well be hoping he’ll do a similar thing for Star Wars. At this point they don’t have much old material or legacy left to build from. Anyone stepping into the galaxy will have to start a new era, with a new cast of characters, and try to cut their own path, no doubt with some nostalgia threaded in there to win back lost fans.
With Skeleton Crew, he created a show that featured new characters, and instead used its ’80s aesthetic to summon up some nostalgia. While it was overlooked by most people, I don’t think that’s an indictment on its quality, rather that it was just the last in a long line of Disney+ shows that had seen declining viewers, and had the misfortune to release just a few months after The Acolyte.
Much like Shawn Levi, he’s a safe, proven, successful director who Disney-Lucasfilm are used to working with. They’re not visionary filmmakers, but I’m not doing any revisionism and pretending they haven’t both made competent, enjoyable and profitable movies in the past, just because Destin Daniel Cretton made a Spider-Man movie.
It’s not an inspired choice, but who could take his place anyway? I don’t think Star Wars is a good place for filmmakers right now, considering all the names who’ve tried and failed to get their movies made, from Guillermo Del Toro to Steven Soderbergh and Patty Jenkins. Even those who got their movies to production struggled, with Gareth Edwards and Lord and Miller being replaced on their projects by more agreeable choices.
There aren’t many directors left who haven’t been involved at some point, and if Lucasfilm are playing it safe, as they seem to be, they’ll want someone used to working under the top-down executive structure they operate.
Certainly he can’t do any more damage to the brand. I’m not sure anyone can at this point. As The Mandalorian and Grogu showed, most people don’t care anymore, and there’s nothing left to destroy. Han, Luke, Leia and their legacies are gone. The Acolyte undermined the Jedi’s history. Ahsoka has ruined Thrawn and the New Republic. Obi Wan Kenobi was thoroughly deconstructed. Even Boba Fett’s potential has been squandered. The worst Watts could do right now is make a boring movie.
Yet I won’t pretend I have much hope for the future, either for Starfighter or this new trilogy. The franchise is in a very poor state right now, and a couple of decent films couldn’t fix that. The Last Jedi broke the foundations of SW, and every subsequent bad movie and show has broken a little piece more, and lost a small section of the fanbase too. Now, there’s barely anything left.
With all the glee the sequels took in destroying what came before, they forgot to build anything for the future, or rather they expected you to accept a handful of insipid characters and a resetting of the status quo to post-ROTJ levels. Clearly that wasn’t even enough for Disney, who until now have decided not to make any new stories set after Rise of Skywalker.
Yet the franchise can only exist in the past for so long. Prequels and spin-offs only work if the story they are leading to or building off are strong, and in this case they aren’t.
Star Wars needs a fix, and it seems the route they’ve taken is to slowly and steadily build back up, a little at a time, switching back to theatrical releases after their streaming experiment failed. It’s true they might be more successful if they choose a focused, creative talent to lead things in a bold new era, but as I’ve already mentioned, who would take such a role now?
I can completely understand why anyone would want Star Wars to just stop, and save any more embarrassment from projects like Mando & Grogu. It would likely be for the best, because I’m not sure SW can even be saved at this point, no matter how many good movies are released, let alone reacquire the cultural heights it used to enjoy.
It’s taken so many hits this last decade, it might never recover from, and there’s no guarantee, even if Starfighter and Episode X are incredible, that they’ll win back the lost audience and become hits. But if Star Wars is truly gone, remember it was J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, Kathleen Kennedy, Dave Filoni, Bob Iger, and Leslye Headland who killed it, not Jon Watts.
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