This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away: ‘Rogue Squadron’ Is Back On the Line… Or Is It?; Michael Culver Dies, and More
Happy Sunday, and welcome to a new edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away“, as we patiently continue to wait for The Acolyte trailer to hit. I’m starting to think they will wait until Disney’s annual meeting with investors on April 3, but I hope to be wrong. (The anonymous Twitter account @Cryptic4KQual, known for accurately reporting on upcoming trailers, mentioned that there is a trailer ready to release this month, and there will also be a special look attached to The Phantom Menace‘s re-release.) Today, however, we’ll be talking about Rogue Squadron.
Before we get to that, though, we had a couple of new episodes of The Bad Batch hit Disney Plus on Wednesday, so check out Jay’s written review here, and his/Brian and Tyler’s discussion on SWNN Live! here. The latter two also discussed the first four issues of The High Republic comic series (Phase II) on Monday’s The Timeline Show. Now, let’s get on with the show!
Three Things That May Have Flown Casual
- Sad news: Michael Culver, who played the iconic Captain Needa in The Empire Strikes Back (“Apology accepted, Captain Needa” might ring a bell, the famous Darth Vader line right before he sucked the life out of the Imperial officer), passed away this week at 85. In more sad news, but Jake Lloyd’s mother also opened up about his son’s mental health struggles — interestingly, unrelated to the reception to The Phantom Menace. “He was just riding his bike outside, playing with his friends. He didn’t know. He didn’t care,” she said about the kid growing up.
- Fake news of the week: Somehow, most of the Internet has been misreporting the numbers from a recent Disney presentation to shareholders as part of their proxy fight against activist investor Nelson Peltz. The company said that they’ve made three times their investment into film productions (meaning production budgets as well as publicity and advertising for all five Star Wars films), and yet, most outlets are reporting this as Disney having made $12B from their original $4B acquisition of Lucasfilm. Not true!
- More debunking fake news: Brendan Wayne is doing some damage control (I guess?) by stating that he doesn’t know whether The Mandalorian season 4 will happen or not. He also said that he expects Pedro Pascal to be on The Mandalorian & Grogu, though never explicitly said on the set (even if it’s implied). Regardless, here’s a good rule of thumb: never trust an actor!
The Never-Ending Story of Star Wars Production Schedules
Here I am yet another week talking about my favorite thing — trying to figure out when each upcoming Star Wars movie is going to shoot. Though this week hasn’t brought any specific news pertinent to this topic, there was a small bit of info I thought worth bringing up. Warner Bros. announced on Tuesday that The Batman Part II would be suffering a one-year delay from its original release date, now landing October 2026. But why?
The announcement didn’t come with a justification, but strike-related reasons were quickly given by the media. When reporting the story on our sister site, MovieNewsNet.com, I came very close to including my own speculation: the first movie was shot in the UK, and (also due to the strikes) major stages may have been booked, including Pinewood Studios which will be used for Fantastic Four in late summer/early fall… and (pure speculation) possibly Lucasfilm’s New Jedi Order (w/t). However, after doing a quick search, I found that the previous Batman movie hadn’t used Pinewood Studios, though it did shoot in many other UK places, so I decided to leave it out.
That night, reporter Jeff Sneider did mention in his newsletter that part of the reason behind The Batman Part II‘s delay was that “scheduling has been a beast for this movie because major stages have been booked through the end of the year.” I assume that, much like the first installment, Part II will film in the UK, or at least that may have been their first option, so I’ll take the educated guess that major UK stages have been booked through the end of the year. I’ve been talking about how Lucasfilm booking Pinewood around Marvel’s Fantastic Four may be a problem, but I think I can conclude from this that Disney has reserved Pinewood through the end of the year and the beginning of next.
Does that mean New Jedi Order will start shooting in 2024? Not necessarily, though I imagine set builders and production designers will be hitting those floors before the end of the year, if not the end of the summer. Daisy Ridley mentioned a few days ago that she doesn’t know whether the pic will film in late 2024 or early 2025. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed.
Rogue Squadron Is Back On the Line… Or Is It?
It was the biggest news of the week, but I feel like it will be forgotten within the next couple of weeks. When interviewed as a guest in TCM/Max’s Talking Pictures podcast, director Patty Jenkins said that she’s back working for Lucasfilm under a new deal that was signed right before the strike last summer. In the new version of Rogue Squadron, a movie that was once announced to be coming in December 2023 and which was later put on the back burner (according to Lucasfilm, at least, i.e., it was shelved indefinitely), she will be writing the script.
However, this all sounds very fishy. Both Variety and TheWrap reached out for comment to Lucasfilm and Disney, respectively, and they didn’t hear back — which is at least worth noting. Lucasfilm was quick to confirm to Variety that Lando had been turned into a feature film when Stephen Glover made a similar slip last summer. Jenkins’ relationship with Lucasfilm was reported last year to have been problematic, and the studio seemed to have moved on.
Since Rogue Squadron was put on hold in the fall of 2021, Lucasfilm started development on six feature films, not including the previously announced pic from Taika Waititi. Jenkins says she owes them a draft of the script, which would suggest that the project is of at least some interest to the company — and yet, why haven’t they responded? This feels to me like they’re stalling, and at best, they’ll get a script they can develop into a feature film down the line should there be interest.
Reporter Jeff Sneider said as much during the last episode of The Hot Mic, adding that it is not in active development. (I imagine that’s a question of semantics; if I were to guess, only The Mandalorian & Grogu and New Jedi Order are in active development — they are in pre-production, actually. That doesn’t mean that Dave Filoni and James Mangold’s features will not get made.)
Just consider the landscape here. Those two movies are coming in 2026, and the other two movies that Lucasfilm confirmed last year, James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi (w/t) and Dave Filoni’s untitled pic, will come in 2027 at the earliest. I feel like we have our plates full for the next few years — why are we wasting everyone’s time with Rogue Squadron? To me, the real issue here is that there isn’t really a place for this story inside Lucasfilm’s plan. They already have a post-Rise of Skywalker movie in the works with the Daisy Ridley movie, do you really need another one? If the plan is to reshuffle this one and set it in the Galactic Civil War era, I’m simply out.
For all of the reasons listed above, I will be shocked if anyone at Lucasfilm utters the words Rogue Squadron again, other than to say the movie isn’t happening anymore (which I feel they won’t do; it will just quietly go away). Patty should probably go back to non-IP filmmaking and try to earn some reputation points elsewhere. That Cleopatra movie with Gal Gadot sounded kinda interesting, though I guess that’s Kari Skogland’s thing now. Just go direct the next Monster and get your lead actress an Oscar nomination. That will probably help us all forget about Wonder Woman 1984. (Or, if you really want to do Star Wars, here’s a suggestion: call up Leslye Headland and get yourself a director’s chair on The Acolyte season 2. You have plenty of TV experience in your resumé.)
Jocasta Nu’s Reading List
- Star Wars News Net: So many reviews this week! Check out Jay’s two-part review of the new Battlefront Classic Collection here and here. Aled also broke down the new issue of Star Wars: Insider, as well as the I, Jedi Essential Legends Collection audiobook. Josh tackled Darth Vader #44, and Tyler reviewed The High Republic #4.
- Disney Dawgs: Apparently, Disney Parks is preparing a giant floating pram similar to the one used by Grogu in The Mandalorian. At least, that’s what a new patent filed by Disney Enterprises hints at.
- CBR: Robert Vaux tries his best to explain why Ahsoka wasn’t a part of the story of the original trilogy.
- Screen Rant: Sean Morrison explains why Cad Bane would be the ideal villain for The Mandalorian & Grogu. Honestly? Let the dead not speak anymore.
- Puck: You’ve been reading all about it all week long. TikTok could be banned in the US soon if its parent Chinese company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell the asset to US investors. Here, Matt Belloni breaks down data from Apptopia, an insights firm for connected devices, which says that a majority of the 90+ minutes the daily American uses on TikTok could go to streaming services instead. Will Star Wars benefit from this push?
What did you think of the latest edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away”? Let me know your thoughts and suggestions down below in the comment section. You can also send them, or reach out with any information tips, directly via our Contact page.
Have a great week!
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.
