Damon Lindelof says the Star Wars movie he was hired to help shape ended in failure, and that the problem was not the premise but the center. Speaking recently on House of R, Lindelof said he was brought in after being asked what he thought a Star Wars movie should be, then was fired two years later after the project stalled.
“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. And so I was wrong. At least through that prism,” he said. The movie he worked on was believed to be an early version of a Rey-centric New Jedi Order story set after The Rise of Skywalker, and Lindelof said the team was trying to build a film around “a force of nostalgia and a force of revision” pulling against each other.
That mattered because the franchise is still trying to define what comes next. Star Wars Celebration announced three different films in 2023, but none had shown any significant public movement by the time Lindelof spoke. This week, The Mandalorian and Grogu is opening in theaters, putting a new face on the big-screen future while the older sequel-trilogy characters remain unresolved in the wider plan.
Lindelof said the writing was difficult because the tone kept shifting and the film’s place in the canon was not clear. He said it was not even settled whether the project was intended to launch a new trilogy. “It was slow. The tone. Getting it right. Where it was inside of the canon? What its relationship was with to Episode IX? Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things,” he said. He added that in the aftermath of Episode IX, “finding the center of Star Wars” became much harder.
He contrasted that uncertainty with the reset that followed Episode VII, when, in his telling, the franchise had a clearer core. “When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was,” Lindelof said. “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.” He said fans understood that the new trilogy would begin with those new characters at the center.
Now, he said, the question is less settled. “The new question are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars?” Lindelof asked. That uncertainty sits at the heart of the broader problem for Disney’s film slate, where no project has yet reclaimed the kind of clear narrative gravity the franchise had when the sequels began. Lindelof, known for Lost, Watchmen and the upcoming Lanterns, was believed to have been working on a film directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, but the project never advanced publicly into production. For Star Wars, the unanswered question is no longer whether there are ideas in development. It is which characters, if any, can still hold the center.
