Star Wars is finally returning to the big screen, but Damon Lindelof finally reveals what his cancelled movie would have been about. The future of Star Wars has been in limbo since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, with Lucasfilm struggling to figure out how to move on from the sequel trilogy. Disney nixed Adam Driver and Steven Soderbergh’s The Hunt for Ben Solo, and attention shifted to Daisy Ridley’s Rey. Her “New Jedi Order” movie has been in limbo, and now Damon Lindelof – who worked on one version – has opened up about the script he was working on before he was let go in early 2023.
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Speaking on The Ringer-Verse podcast, Lindelof explained that his story would have reimagined the light and dark sides of the Force. The script would have been “the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars,” a meta story that reflected debates in the fandom itself. “There is a Force of nostalgia,” he explained, “and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another.” It’s a conscious response to reactions to the sequel, where some elements of the fandom resisted moving on to the new “center of Star Wars” – Rey, Finn, and Poe.
Lucasfilm apparently liked the premise, but Lindelof admits the writing was slow work. “The writing was really hard,” he said. “Getting the tone right, where it was inside the canon, what its relationship was with Episode IX, is it starting a new trilogy, all of those things… It’s the old tanker equation, where you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns.”
Lindelof’s Story is What Star Wars Needs
Lindelof has identified the contradiction at the heart of Star Wars. On the one hand, this franchise needs to push forward and do something new; Star Wars has overplayed the nostalgia card since The Force Awakens, and it’s had a catastrophic effect on the franchise as a whole. The problem, though, is that elements of the fanbase do not want to allow any progression; we saw that with the overdone backlash against The Acolyte, but it’s always been there. Back in 1999, the prequel trilogy divided the fandom in much the same way the sequels have now. Star Wars is a generational saga, but every generation resists letting go – a very Anakin Skywalker problem.
Lindelof’s idea sounds absolutely fascinating, because it makes the conflict between nostalgia and revision far more explicit. It’s tempting to assume he’s making a straightforward parallel – nostalgia as the dark side, revision as the light – but that feels like too simplistic an interpretation. The more likely scenario is that the dark side would have been present in both movements, and that the film was about how we interpret the past and look towards the future. All in all, this is an essential debate Star Wars desperately needs to happen (especially in light of The Mandalorian and Grogu, where reviews suggest Lucasfilm has gone for a much “safer” approach that isn’t resonating with critics at all).
This isn’t to say Lindelof’s ideas were necessarily the right ones. Lindelof’s original pitch was decades after The Rise of Skywalker, and he daydreamed of Helen Mirren playing an older Rey. That would have wasted Daisy Ridley, whose Star Wars return was announced at Celebration 2023 (and still hasn’t happened, because the tanker is still moving so slowly). But the basic idea sounds essential for Star Wars, because this is a debate the franchise desperately needs to have – simply because, right now, an overdose of nostalgia is doing massive damage.
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