Two Star Wars movies that seemed to have quietly evaporated have resurfaced in the least glamorous place imaginable — a trade listings magazine. The September 3, 2026 issue of Production Weekly names both Star Wars: New Jedi Order and Dave Filoni’s untitled film as in-development projects. That is not a greenlight and it is not an announcement from Lucasfilm, but it does mean neither script has been dropped in a drawer and forgotten.
The timing is pointed. Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu struggled at the box office, and the obvious worry was that Disney would react by thinning out its feature slate rather than filling it back in.
New Jedi Order is the project carrying the most scar tissue. It would bring Daisy Ridley back as Rey roughly 15 years after the events of Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, with the character rebuilding the Jedi — a direct line back to a trilogy large parts of the fandom still resent, which is a steep starting position for any film. It has also cycled through writers at an alarming clip. Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen) and Justin Britt-Gibson wrote first and were fired by Disney; the pair are now working together on HBO’s superhero detective series Lanterns. Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight came aboard next and left the project in 2024. George Nolfi (The Bourne Ultimatum) is the current screenwriter, a hire reported in January 2025. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is set to direct. The film was originally scheduled for December 17, 2027, then pulled from Disney’s release calendar in May 2025.
Filoni’s movie is the more mysterious of the two, and Production Weekly’s blurb is the most concrete description of it yet: “The story will focus on the New Republic and will conclude the interconnected narratives told in The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, and other Disney Plus series.” A capstone for the streaming era, in other words — a premise that had circulated as a rumor and now appears to have survived The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s underperformance.
Filoni has considerably more say in that outcome than he used to. In January 2026 he took over as president and chief creative officer at Lucasfilm, after years of shepherding The Clone Wars, Rebels, Ahsoka, Maul – Shadow Lord and more. His shows are generally well received; the recurring criticism is that they ask viewers to carry an increasingly complicated and insular continuity in their heads. Handing him a film that explicitly braids four series together is either the natural endpoint of that approach or its stress test.
As of September 2026, the only Star Wars film with a concrete release date is Star Wars: Starfighter, set five years after the events of Rise of Skywalker and starring Ryan Gosling as a pilot, with Shawn Levy (Deadpool & Wolverine) directing. It arrives in theaters on May 28, 2027. Between features, the franchise has kept moving through television, including The Ninth Jedi, and through games such as the tactics title Star Wars: Zero Company.
