Last night it was announced via Deadline that Game of Thrones duo David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are now officially exiting the Star Wars trilogy they had been planning to write/produce for Lucasfilm. The reason behind the exit was because of a scheduling conflict.
Those scheduling conflicts due to their massive deal with Netflix reportedly worth $300 million.
The first installment was said to be the first post-Skywalker Saga film and would be released on December 16th, 2022. This certainly gives Lucasfilm/Disney plenty of time to find another Star Wars film to place in that spot.
While it is still unclear when Rian Johnson’s trilogy and Kevin Feige’s movie could be ready to go there is another film project that had been reported on by BuzzFeed earlier in the year.
They stated that screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (Avatar, Alita: Battle Angel, Ghost In The Shell, Shutter Island, Altered Carbon) was writing a Knights of The Old Republic movie that could be expanded into its own trilogy. It was unknown at the time if the project had been something else separate from when Benioff/Weiss and Johnson were developing.
A movie based on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic — the beloved video game first released in 2003 — is currently being written by Laeta Kalogridis (Avatar, Shutter Island) for Lucasfilm, three sources close to the project told BuzzFeed News.
Kalogridis is close to finishing the first script of a potential KOTOR trilogy, according to the three sources.
Fans had assumed that the films Benioff/Weiss were developing were Old Republic related because of their ties to HBO’s Game of Thrones, but as with most fan theories that was just speculation and not based on actual information.
However, in April Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy admitted to MTVNews during Star Wars Celebration in Chicago that they were indeed developing something within the Old Republic universe when asked about Knights of The Old Republic.
MTV: Knights of The Old Republic, a lot of fans wanna see that, is there any development of that?
KENNEDY: “You know, we talk about that all the time. Yes, we are developing something to look at. Right now, I have no idea where things might fall..”
She didn’t give away any details but it is surprising that Lucasfilm was even considering it, let alone development.
I think most Star Wars fans are dying to see Lucasfilm explore something like that.
The cinematic trailers for the Old Republic games from Tim Miller’s Blur Studio have been fantastic and seeing Star Wars move outside of the lineage of the Skywalker Saga would be something special along with exploring the armies of Jedi and Sith (before the Rule of Two).
Legacy content had multiple full-scale galactic wars between Sith and Jedi, which could be something extremely different from what we’ve had in the last 11 movies including the addition of a Sith Empire.
The Old Republic is an excellent way to give filmmakers distance from George Lucas’ original films and putting their own visual/narrative stamp on the Star Wars universe.
This might rub some fans the wrong way but I’d love to see that era start from scratch, not some adaptation of the video games or comic books. A brand spanking new mythology because the worst part is how beholden fans want future films to be to existing material when The Old Republic era can be something completely different and unpredictable.
I think if the Knights of The Old Republic script indeed exists and they’re happy with it, they should just go ahead with production. Unless Rian Johnson’s film is in a better position to begin shooting first.
We’ll have to wait and see what Lucasfilm does with that December 16th, 2022 spot.
