Star Wars: Patty Jenkins Details How She Scored Rogue Squadron Opportunity

Patty Jenkins has proven over the course of her career how talented she is as a filmmaker, thanks to films like Wonder Woman and Monster, though the announcement that she would be helming Star Wars: Rogue Squadron took some fans by surprise, with the filmmaker recently noting that she scored the gig thanks to much of her Wonder Woman 1984 crew working on Star Wars films, leading to casual conversations with Lucasfilm about a project she wanted to make. The studio ended up asking her about her interests in making a Star Wars film and that the mere mention of the concept of Rogue Squadron immediately excited her, thanks to her filmmaking instincts as well as her personal connection to the concept.

“We were friendly with each other,” Kennedy shared with Yahoo when discussing how she came to collaborate with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “I share a lot of the same crew so we were friends and I had gone over there and been on set when they were doing the last Star Wars while we were doing Wonder Woman 1984. Our sets were friendly.”

As the filmmaker detailed in her announcement video, Jenkins’ father was a fighter pilot and she has hoped to develop a film about the subject for quite some time, with this opportunity offering her the chance to not only make an impressive fighter-pilot movie, but also do it in the galaxy far, far away.

“What happened was [Lucasfilm] just approached me and [asked] would I ever be interested and I said it would really depend on what the story was,” Jenkins pointed out. “I just always want to make sure that I feel I can make an amazing movie. And when they said Rogue Squadron I almost gasped. Because I couldn’t believe that they were so wise to know and somehow intuit that that’s exactly what I’ve been dying to do for so long because of my past and growing up around fighter pilots. It really is a movie I’ve been dying to make. I spent years trying to make a movie about Chuck Yeager. So this is just a huge honor to get to take this on.”

Star Wars fans will surely recognize the name “Rogue Squadron,” as they were the subject of a number of novels, comic books, and video games, all of which are now relegated to the “Legends” corner of the franchise.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is set to hit theaters on December 22, 2023.

Are you looking forward to the new film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!