September 29, 2026 11:33 am
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We’ve been curious what the hell happened to “Star Wars: Rogue Squadron” after director Patty Jenkins (“Wonder Woman”) was announced for the film in late 2020 (Matthew Robinson later tapped to write), only for it to be stuck in limbo and scrapped. But some new revelations suggest that the project has gone through MULTIPLE incarnations and was even being pitched as one of the many Disney+ series after it looked like the movie wasn’t going to be an option.
Knight Edge Media has collected some history on the project and, in the wake of going over that information, reports that, over the project’s development, Lucasfilm had different incarnations beyond the version Jenkins had been working on before the project fizzled out. This comes after the outlet revealed over the weekend that Jon Watts (“Star Wars: Skeleton Crew”) would be directing a Simon Kinberg(“Star Wars: Rebels”) script for what is expected to be “Star Wars: Episode X,” leading to a new Skywalker Saga trilogy.
The main meat of the piece: directorJ.D. Dillard‘s “Star Wars” mystery project was an earlier version of “Rogue Squadron” (Jenkins later brought on) that goes back to 2018 (had been working on a script with Matt Owens of “Luke Cage” and “One Piece“) before the studio decided to pivot to Jenkins and then to a streaming series. That would have had Rick Famuyiwa (“The Mandalorian”) as co-showrunner with Rayna McClendon (worked on “Obi-Wan Kenobi” and “Star Wars: The New Jedi Order” as a writer), but that also didn’t get too far (sadly, a common occurrence with modern “Star Wars” projects).
Dillard would go on to make his Korean War film “Devotion,” featuring U.S. pilots played byJonathan Majors and Glen Powell, so it’s not entirely hard to envision him tackling “Rogue Squadron.” His next big offering is going to be theApple TVseries “Neuromancer” coming to the streaming service in January, starring James Bond hopeful Callum Turnerand based on the classic William Gibson cyberpunk novel (which inspired things like “The Matrix” and “Inception“).
After something like “Andor,” you could, in theory, envision Emmy-winning writer Dan Gilroy or other creatives (not named Tony Gilroy) potentially being recruited to help out with something like “Rogue Squadron,” given it would be another chapter in the Rebellion offshoots (“Rogue One” and “Andor” having ties to “Rogue Squadron” could make some sense with some tweaking).
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With Dave Filoni now overseeing the franchise and Lucasfilm at-large, we have some hinkering that he may want to revisit that side of things (given Filoni himself cameos in the shows as a New Republic pilot). However, it doesn’t sound like there are active plans to circle back to “Rogue Squadron” anytime soon, but that could change over time.
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