‘Star Wars’ New Jedi Order Film: Title Rumors, Production Schedules, and Latest Speculation
If I were into gambling, I would be very willing to put a lot of money into Lucasfilm’s first item on their internal meetings being the upcoming Daisy Ridley-led Star Wars feature film, which Steven Knight is scripting and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directing. (Taika Waititi’s project would be a not-so-distant #2 in my book.)
If you’ve been paying attention to some of the latest instances from the Star Wars rumor mill you might have noticed some headlines claiming that the title for the new film has been uncovered — this is apparently coming from a Reddit post that may or may not have been posted in recent weeks, which said the title of the film will be Star Wars: A New Beginning. Allow us to throw a bit of light on this.
Per sources, Lucasfilm hasn’t decided on a title for the film yet and is more focused on getting the actual story right for now. I hear that saying this is the title as of today is absolutely incorrect, but at some point, a shortlist of possible titles will be considered, and “A New Beginning” is not out of the question. Does that mean that there is already a list that includes it? I personally wouldn’t be surprised, but couldn’t find out.
Back in early April, Kathleen Kennedy said that Lucasfilm was due a script by the end of May. Of course, that never happened, because the Writers Guild of America went on strike on May 2, and union members were asked to put their pencils down (or close their FinalDraft windows). With a new contract between the writers and the studios now ratified, scribes across the industry are back to work — including Steven Knight. I speculated recently that the end of May window may have been moved to the end of October, given Knight was allowed to open FinalDraft again back in late September.
However, since they’ve stopped working for a long time, and they actually can’t really move forward with pre-production until the SAG-AFTRA strike ends and they can cast the movie, I argued the studio might have given Knight time until Thanksgiving. Well, while they didn’t get into more specifics, sources in the know say this end-of-October/Thanksgiving due date is in the ballpark of Lucasfilm’s actual plans. So it seems fair to assume that by the Christmas break, Lucasfilm will at least have read the new script, and likely given notes as well.
According to reports from earlier this year, shooting was scheduled to start in April 2024 in London. However, if by Christmas we still don’t have a finished script and we haven’t even cast the movie, that seems doubtful, to say the least. An August/September start date seems much more reasonable, maybe even slightly optimistic. It all hinges on whether Knight’s draft is a winner with Lucasfilm and they move forward with this version of story, or not.
Think of additional variables as well: Is anyone besides Daisy Ridley coming back too? The name John Boyega is the first to come to mind, obviously, and at some point, he must have come up in conversations inside Lucasfilm. John Rocha said on the Hot Mic podcast a few months ago that he’d heard he was in talks to return along with Ridley for this new film.
Whether or not that’s true, that he’s been contacted seems like a more than reasonable assumption, so we may be in a situation where they may have to write scripts with and without him, in case he ends up backing down. The likely scenario is that, given his past experiences with the sequel trilogy, he might have requested to see the script before he writes his name on the dotted line. Boyega himself has said he’d be open to coming back, and earlier this summer he did sign with UTA, one of the three big Hollywood talent agencies, which could signify he’s planning a big comeback to the industry after doing smaller projects for a couple of years. Reps for Boyega did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Names like Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, or Oscar Isaac seem like much bigger stretches, and at most they would be reduced to cameos — something that can be inserted into or taken out of the script depending on who agrees to return. The film’s big get still is, of course, Daisy Ridley. While reports suggest she was not part of Damon Lindelof’s story, the actress had several meetings with Lucasfilm towards the end of 2023 and repeated across several interviews at the beginning of 2023 that she’d love to return. A bit of an unexpected twist, but it seems plausible to assume that Kathleen Kennedy and her team weren’t in love with Lindelof’s idea of exploring an elder Rey and started exploring the possibility of bringing Daisy back a couple of months before Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson were supposed to turn in their draft. I imagine they also had Steven Knight on hold by then.
But is Daisy just coming back, business as usual? It seems like a good guess that she was at least given a multiple-film deal, but perhaps even more than that. She has a lot more bargaining power than she had back in 2013 when she signed to do The Force Awakens, and the story will be centered around her character, so it’s entirely possible she will also have a role as a producer on the film, similar to how Diego Luna is an executive producer on Andor. Such a deal would allow Ridley to be a part of Lucasfilm’s meetings on the film while SAG-AFTRA is still on strike. In other words, she wouldn’t be able to rehearse the lines, but she could give her input on the latest story developments. For now, this remains entirely speculatory. We have reached out to Ridley’s reps to try to confirm, but did not hear back.
As far as the release date goes, May 22, 2026, still seems in the cards, although I wonder if the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike and the stream of delays it’s about to cause will affect it. Shooting at any time in 2024 seems more than enough time to make it to May 2026, but who knows what the bottleneck of projects in need of VFX studios (and even the entire VFX landscape) will even look like by then.
Whatever the case may be, it seems like we’re about to get a lot of Star Wars film news, which is the perfect Christmas gift for us at Star Wars News Net! Stay tuned to celebrate it with us.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
