J.D. Dillard Reveals His ‘Star Wars’ Project Is No Longer Happening
When one door opens, another one shuts. Shortly after news gets out that Shawn Levy would be doing a Star Wars movie, it has been confirmed by J.D. Dillard that he will no longer be making his Star Wars movie for undisclosed reasons. His project was initially reported in February 2020, with hardly any word of it since, and now we know why.
Back in February 2020, The Hollywood Reporter claimed J.D. Dillard and Matt Owens would be working on an upcoming Star Wars movie of some kind, with it being unclear if the movie was set to be theatrical or an offering for Disney Plus. After that, there were virtually no updates on this whatsoever, and Dillard would go on to work on a Netflix adaptation of the long-running manga One Piece for Netflix. So it’s not too surprising that, after nearly three years of total silence on the project, it’s been revealed that Dillard’s Star Wars movie is no longer happening, nor will he be directing the planned legacy sequel to The Rocketeer for Disney Plus.
Talking with The Wrap about the upcoming World War II fighter pilot movie Devotion, J.D. Dillard explained that his movie wouldn’t be going forward for unspecified reasons:
“[My Star Wars movie is] unfortunately no longer a thing. It was not for lack of trying!”
While he did not go into what his movie would be about, he mentioned that his love of Star Wars owes itself to his love of the TIE Fighter flight simulator video game, which is how he was first introduced to the franchise:
“I’m playing this game for months. And my dad’s flying it with me. And I’m like, ‘Man, this game is just so cool.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, you know, this game comes from a series of movies.’ And I was like, ‘You’re kidding me.’ That is where I watched Star Wars for the first time and realized the full scope of what it meant to world build because I’d been playing this pseudo-16-bit game.”
Dillard made a cameo as one of the stormtroopers in The Rise of Skywalker, specifically FN-1226, one of the two stormtroopers that Rey uses a Jedi mind trick on. It remains to be seen whether we’ll see Dillard again in a galaxy far, far away.
Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.
