Remember Shawn Levy’s upcoming Star Wars movie? Don’t worry, the Deadpool & Wolverine director is still making the film — and we’ve even got a little update about it to reassure us, direct from the project’s writer, Jonathan Tropper.
"I am [excited] too," the scribe told Screen Rant about the future film. "I hope it's on the way sooner than you think."
The movie is, at this point, mostly a complete mystery. One of the only things we really know about it so far is that it is set after The Rise of Skywalker. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy previously explained the film’s place in the timeline. "That’s also in the future,” she said of Levy’s film in an interview with Deadline in February. “It’s all post-[the first] nine. Shawn’s is a standalone Star Wars story that'll take place post-nine, maybe five or six years out.” That would make this film the first one to explore the post-Rise of Skywalker era.
In the same chat, Kennedy also confirmed that the movie would arrive after 2026’s The Mandalorian and Grogu. "I'm producing the Mandalorian movie right now, and I'm also producing Shawn Levy's movie, which is after that,” she explained. Finally, the last major detail we know about Levy’s project is that Ryan Gosling is reportedly set to star in the film.
Hopefully Tropper’s words are a good omen that indicates things are finally on track for Levy’s film. After all, it’s not going to come until at least the last quarter of 2026, if not 2027 — so ultimately, we have a lot of waiting to do.
Disney hasn’t released a Star Wars film since the universally panned Star Wars: Episode 9 - The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, but it has cancelled several films in that time, such as one from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and another trilogy from Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. In November, a Star Wars movie that had previously staked out a late 2026 release date was pulled from Disney's calendar.
At 2023's Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm announced three new Star Wars feature films: a Dave Filoni-directed New Republic film set in his Mando-verse, a Dawn of the Jedi movie led by James Mangold, and a New Jedi Order feature directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy that's set to have Daisy Ridley reprise her role as Rey after the events of The Rise of Skywalker.
That Obaid-Chinoy project has gone through several changes, with screenwriter Steven Knight recently departing after taking over for Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson. Still, Rey as a character is still apparently a major priority for Disney moving forward, with a recent THR report saying that she's set to appear in several upcoming Star Wars films.
And, believe it or not, that's not even all Disney has on the Star Wars docket moving forward. It was revealed late last year that X-Men producer Simon Kinberg is set to write a new trilogy that isn't, contrary to initial reports, a continuation of the Skywalker Saga.
The next Star Wars property to hit your screen will be Season 2 of Andor, which is set to premiere on Disney+ on April 22 with a jam-packed triple premiere episode.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
