Damon Lindelof Reflects on Being Fired From Star Wars
Watchmen and Lost writer Damon Lindelof has been chatting about why his Star Wars movie didn't go anywhere.
As Lucasfilm rolls out its first Star Wars movie for seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu, all eyes are on the struggling Disney franchise to see if this new outing from a galaxy far, far away can make a splash at the box office.
Various Star Wars movies have been in the works since the release of The Rise of Skywalker back in 2019, but most have lingered in development hell before being nixed. Only the aforementioned theatrical debut of the franchise’s live-action TV series and a forthcoming Ryan Gosling movie called Starfighter have entered production to date, and the writer behind one of Lucasfilm’s nixed projects has been giving fans a peek behind the scenes while discussing the reasons that his own take didn’t make the grade.
Lost and Watchmen scribe Damon Lindelof recently stopped by The Ringer-Verse’s House of R podcast to chat about all things Star Wars, where he opened up about being fired from a proposed Rey-centric “Protestant Reformation” project that would have explored the iconic fantasy universe beyond Rise of Skywalker.
“They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired,” Lindelof told the pod. “And so I was wrong. At least through that prism. What we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon and I, was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision, and they are at odds with one another, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars, and it didn’t work. The conversation that the fandom is having without winking and looking at the audience… that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
Lindelof went on to say that Lucasfilm had seemed to like the premise of the movie, but described the writing process as “really hard,” adding, “It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was with to episode nine. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of the tanker equation which is you turn the wheel and it takes 5 minutes before it turns a little bit like this.”
Ultimately, the writing team couldn’t find “the center of Star Wars” because it just wasn’t clear where the franchise wanted to go next. “When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was. It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we were migrating back in and Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys. But we got the sense that, when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the center of Star Wars. The new question is are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars now?”
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently sitting at 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, but Disney is eyeing a $160M global box office opening. With Starfighter being the only movie lined up for release at the time of writing, it’s still unclear whether the franchise will go next.