The Star Wars franchise was once known for having a huge string of successful installments, but with it being more than three years since the last movie landed in theaters, there’s a lot of pressure on what the next big-screen adventure will be, a pressure which filmmaker Damon Lindelof is fully aware of. With Lindelof slated to develop a new entry for the galaxy far, far away, he admits that the pressure of delivering a great film sometimes makes him doubt whether he should be working on such a project in the first place. As compared to other projects at Lucasfilm, which are announced and then ultimately get shelved when significant momentum never happens, the studio has been much quieter about what Lindelof has in store for fans.
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“I will just say, that for reasons that I can’t get into on this Sunday morning, on this day, the degree of difficulty is extremely, extremely, extremely high. If it can’t be great, it shouldn’t exist,” Lindelof admitted to /Film. “That’s all I’ll say, because I have the same association with it as you do, which is, it’s the first movie I saw sitting in my dad’s lap, four years old, May of ’77. I think it’s possible that sometimes when you hold something in such high reverence and esteem, you start to get in the kitchen and you just go, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be cooking. Maybe I should just be eating.’ We’ll just leave it at that point.”
In the years since Disney purchased Lucasfilm, a variety of projects have been announced that ultimately get quietly removed from schedules, the most recent of which seemingly being a movie from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and the movie Star Wars: Rogue Squadron from Patty Jenkins. The studio announced back in 2017 that Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson would develop a trilogy of films, and while no movement has happened on that project, both Johnson and Lucasfilm continue to claim it’s all about finding the time.
Lindelof isn’t alone in knowing just how much pressure comes with a new Star Wars film, as The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger recently expressed a similar opinion.
“Star Wars, we made three what we called saga films, which is obviously the successors to George Lucas’ first six,” Iger shared at a conference for Morgan Stanley. “They did very well at the box office — tremendously well, as a matter of fact. We’ve made two so-called stand-alones in Rogue One and Solo. Rogue One did quite well, Solo was a little disappointing to us. It gave us pause just to think maybe the cadence was a little too aggressive. And so we decided to pull back a bit. We still are developing Star Wars films. We’re going to make sure that when we make one, that it’s the right one, so we are being very careful there.”
Stay tuned for details on Damon Lindelof’s Star Wars movie.
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