A previously unrealized Star Wars project has been confirmed dead, offering fresh insight into the franchise's uneven post-Skywalker Saga development history as Disney and Lucasfilm continue to recalibrate their theatrical strategy.
The revelation comes at a pivotal moment for the Star Wars franchise, which has struggled to establish theatrical momentum in the years following Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. While Lucasfilm's streaming output — including The Mandalorian and Star Wars: The Bad Batch — successfully sustained the property's connected timeline, big-screen output stalled entirely until this year's The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Favreau. Disney has publicly characterized the film's May theatrical run as underperforming, even as executives maintain confidence in its long-term prospects on Disney+.
The next theatrical entry in development is Star Wars: Starfighter, directed by Shawn Levy and led by Ryan Gosling, slated for release in May 2027. Plot details indicate Gosling's character is tasked with escorting a Force-sensitive child across the galaxy — a setup that has fueled speculation about connections to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's in-development “New Jedi Order” film, which is expected to star Daisy Ridley reprising the role of Rey Skywalker, or to a separate trilogy announced by writer-director Simon Kinberg.
Obaid-Chinoy's project was one of three announced years ago under former Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, alongside films attributed to James Mangold and Dave Filoni. None of the three has received a substantive update since being unveiled at Star Wars Celebration in London three years ago. Kinberg's trilogy was announced independently at a later date.
With Ahsoka Season 2 and Starfighter representing the only confirmed projects currently in active production across film and television, Lucasfilm has no theatrical or streaming title formally dated beyond 2027 — underscoring the scope of the franchise's current planning gap.
Against that backdrop, industry attention has turned to a previously undisclosed chapter in the franchise's development history: a scrapped Star Wars film that was once in the works from Paddington 2 (2017) director Paul King and co-writer Simon Farnaby.
In an interview with Variety, Farnaby confirmed the project's existence and detailed why it ultimately did not move forward. “So we got distracted by that for a while,” he said. Farnaby indicated the concept was built around a robot protagonist and deliberately avoided incorporating any of the franchise's existing characters, a creative direction he now believes conflicted with the studio's expectations. “They were like, we really need it to be a Star Wars movie, which is probably why it didn't get turned into a Star Wars movie!” Farnaby said. “But we never really nailed it.”
Farnaby noted that the underlying concept has not been discarded outright and is being developed further as a project independent of the Star Wars brand.
Following the project's collapse, King and Farnaby moved forward with the Roald Dahl prequel film Wonka, starring Timothée Chalamet, which Warner Bros. released in 2023 to a worldwide box office gross of approximately $634 million.
The disclosure adds to a growing list of high-profile Star Wars projects that stalled prior to production, including a prequel once developed by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — a concept with notable overlap to Mangold's current film centered on the origins of the Force.
With the franchise's theatrical pipeline effectively paused beyond next year, Starfighter‘s box office performance is expected to serve as a key data point for Disney and Lucasfilm as they determine whether standalone stories set outside the Skywalker family's central narrative can sustain audience interest independent of the mainline saga.
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