Kathleen Kennedy Gives An Update On Future 'Star Wars' Movies

Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy has been delivering some good news for "Star Wars" fans!

On Friday, April 7, the 2023 Star Wars Celebration event kicked off in London with news that Daisy Ridley was returning to the franchise to lead a new movie set 15 years after the events of 2019's "The Rise of Skywalker," which wrapped up the nine-episode Skywalker Saga.

The announcement of the new movie led fans to wonder what the status was of other previously announced films, and Kennedy was quick to provide fans with an update!

In a new interview with Variety at the 2023 Star Wars Celebration event in London, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy revealed that Daisy Ridley was "out of her mind excited" to finally announce her new movie after keeping it a secret for so long.

“It was a pretty straightforward phone call,” Kennedy recalled. “I started out by just saying, ‘Hey, I think we’re getting near being ready.’ We’ve been talking a lot about what we’re doing in the movie space and I said, ‘I think we’re getting close to being ready. How would you like to go to Celebration?’ That was really the beginning of it. She was out of her mind excited.”

She also gave fans an update regarding the film trilogy in the works from director Rian Johnson. The "Knives Out" filmmaker directed 2017's controversial "The Last Jedi." Although the news that he was going to create his own trilogy for Lucasfilm was announced shortly after the film premiered, no progress has been made on the film since that time.

After saying, "Rian and I talk all the time," Kennedy admitted that Johnson is "unbelievably busy" with the "Knives Out" series that he is creating for Netflix. “He is unbelievably busy. So we’re not actively involved in anything at the moment because he’s doing another one of the ‘Glass Onion’ movies and then God knows what else," she said. "But he really wants to step back into the space. It’s a big commitment of time, so that’s really on him.”

On May 4, 2020, Kennedy announced that "Thor: Love and Thunder" director Taika Waititi was creating his own "Star Wars" movie. However, in July 2022, the Marvel filmmaker admitted that he has not finished his script yet and expressed doubts that it would even get made when he did.

That being said, it sounds like Kennedy is fully supporting Waititi's vision. Although “Last Night in Soho” writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns was initially attached to co-write the script with Waititi, it looks like he is writing the script on his own.

“Taika is still working away,” Kennedy said. “He’s writing the script himself. He doesn’t really want to bring others into that process and I don’t blame him. He has a very, very unique voice. So we want to protect that and that’s what he’s doing. But we’re going to make that one day.”

Although star Ewan McGregor is ready to return to a galaxy far, far away, it seems that Kathleen Kennedy is not quite ready to greenlight a second season of the six-episode "Obi-Wan Kenobi" limited series that premiered last year.

“That is not an active development,” Kennedy said when asked about a possible second season. “But I never say never, because there’s always the possibility. That show was so well-received and [director] Deborah Chow did such a spectacular job. Ewan McGregor really wants to do another."

"Everybody’s all hands on deck with what we’re doing right now, as you can see by what we showed everybody [at the Celebration]," she continued. "We’ll turn our attention to that again maybe down the road.”

In addition to the new Daisy Ridley film, directed by “Ms. Marvel” filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, creative director Dave Filoni and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” filmmaker James Mangold are also creating films set in a galaxy far, far away.

Although Dave Filoni’s movie will set in the same timeline as “The Mandalorian” universe, James Mangold’s film will take place 25,000 years before the Battle of Yavin and tell an origin story for the Force.

After the news was first announced at Star Wars Celebration, Mangold told Variety that he envisioned a Biblical epic for the film that were popular in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s.

“When I first talked to Kathy Kennedy about it, I said, ‘I just see this opening to make kind of a ‘Ben-Hur’ or ‘Ten Commandments’ about the birth of the Force,’” Mangold explained. “The Force has become a kind of religious legend that spans through all these movies. But where did it come from? How was it found? Who found it? Who was the first Jedi? That’s what I’m writing right now.”

No release dates for any of the three films announced at Star Wars Celebration have been revealed.