Star Wars Movies, Ranked By Likelihood They’ll Ever Be Released

If there’s one thing Lucasfilm loves, it’s people wearing helmets. If there are two things? It’s announcing Star Wars movies. And today at Star Wars Celebration in London, the company dropped the news that they have three new Star Wars movies in the works. Not only that, these three movies aren’t part of a trilogy: they’re three unconnected, standalone movies from different directors, taking place in different time periods.

Those movies range from a dive into the first ever Jedi, thousands of years before the Skywalker Saga, from director James Mangold; to a movie tying together the Disney+ TV shows, from Dave Filoni; and a movie taking place 15 years after Rise of Skywalker, starring Daisy Ridley. All of those, for fans, are exciting on the surface. The only problem is we’ve been here before. Multiple times.

Off the top of my head, there was a Rogue Squadron movie from Patty Jenkins, which has been killed, a Rian Johnson trilogy that has been in the works pretty much since The Last Jedi premiered, and a Taika Waititi movie that at one point was reportedly the closest to fruition, but didn’t make a peep at today’s Star Wars Celebration panel.

Look: we like Star Wars. Star Wars is fun! There’s a lot of Star Wars coming out on TV, including the currently airing The Mandalorian, which is already hard at work on a fourth season; Ahsoka, which premieres on Disney+ in August; Skeleton Crew, which premieres… Some time, probably this year, but maybe not; The Acolyte, focusing on the Dark Side of The Force and premiering next year; and Andor Season 2, which should be premiering in August of 2024.

As for the movies? Even with these three announced projects, we’ve been burned enough that it’s an open question whether they’ll ever happen. With that in mind, let’s wildly speculate about which just-announced Star Wars movie has the most likely chance to actually hit theaters.

1. Dave Filoni’s TV Funhouse

   Directed by Dave Filoni, this movie will be set in the same timeline as The Mandalorian and Ahsoka, as well as The Book of Boba Fett, I guess, and bring together the storylines of the Disney+ shows in one, epic movie. Presumably, this will include the casts of the aforementioned shows, which at this point are an extension of the work Filoni has done on the animated series — specifically Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels.

   Given that Filoni is a driving force behind Star Wars at the current moment, and it’s clear that at the very least the beats of this story — most likely the assembled heroes fighting against fan-favorite villain Grand Admiral Thrawn (casting TBA, though most likely Lars Mikkelsen) — already exist, and the cast is mostly in place, this has a very high chance of existing at some point. It’s an open question whether this will end up being a movie, or if the Disney bean counters will push for it to be a Disney+ miniseries (extending a television franchise on the big screen has had mixed results). But this one is the easiest to predict. You’ll almost definitely be seeing Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff), Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), Grogu (Grogu), and newly introduced Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), as well as some possible surprises (Hayden Christensen as Anakin, perhaps), and Boba Fett (Temeura Morrison), I guess, all mixing it up on some sort of screen.

   Likelihood Of Ever Existing: Extremely High

2. Rey Returns

   Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and set 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, Daisy Ridley will return to the role of Rey Skywalker. In the flick, Rey is now a Jedi Master and leading a new Jedi Academy. In the expanded version of the Star Wars timeline, this period is being called the “New Jedi Order” in case you were curious!

   Unlike (as far as we know) the Filoni project, this one does have some sort of a script to back it up, though this is also the part that may raise some alarm bells. Initially written by Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson, the duo exited the project on March 21. They were quickly replaced by Steven Knight the next day, presumably fixing or tweaking the version written by Lindelof and Britt-Gibson.

   Though this interview took place prior to his exit, in conversation with Slashfilm, Lindelof noted that:

   “I will just say, that for reasons that I can’t get into on this Sunday morning, on this day, the degree of difficulty is extremely, extremely, extremely high. If it can’t be great, it shouldn’t exist. That’s all I’ll say, because I have the same association with it as you do, which is, it’s the first movie I saw sitting in my dad’s lap, four years old, May of ’77. I think it’s possible that sometimes when you hold something in such high reverence and esteem, you start to get in the kitchen and you just go, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be cooking. Maybe I should just be eating.’ We’ll just leave it at that point.”

   Mind you, Knight is a prolific and well-regarded writer on his own, having worked on Peaky Blinders, the recent Great Expectations, and other projects. But the notoriously fastidious Lindelof throwing cold water on this idea is a little nerve-wracking, to say the least. With a director, script, and star in place, the chances of this happening are promising; but with what Lindelof said, the question is… Should this happen?

   Likelihood Of Ever Existing: 60/40 in favor, but could fall apart quickly if the script isn’t up to snuff.

3. James Mangold’s Biblical Jedi Epic

   You know how Star Wars takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”? What if it was an even longer time ago? That’s the idea behind director James Mangold’s movie, set at the “Dawn of the Jedi” which is — wait for it — 25,000 years before any of the previously told theatrical or TV stories.

   “When I first started talking to [Kathleen Kennedy] about doing one of these pictures, what occurred to me was thinking about what kind of genre of movie within Star Wars I wanted to do,” Mangold said, via THR. “And I thought about a Biblical epic, like a Ten Commandments, about the dawning of the Force. Where did the Force come from, when did we discover it, when did we learn how to use it?”

   In favor of this project is that Mangold is already tight with Lucasfilm, having directed the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (which ended today’s panel by showing off a new trailer). Working against this project? Epics take a lot of time, we don’t know the status of the script, whether there is any cast attached, what the actual plot is, or how much trouble they’re going to run into explaining the Force because the last time that happened we got midi-chlorians and everyone hated it.

   The bigger problem, though, is Mangold. Though his career has been heating up significantly in the past few years, the director hasn’t exactly been prolific. After The Wolverine in 2013, he didn’t direct anything theatrically until 2017’s sequel Logan, followed by Ford v. Ferrari in 2019, and Dial of Destiny, which is out this year.

   This is not a knock on Mangold. He takes his time choosing and working on his projects, meticulously charting out every detail. But to that point, Mangold has also recently been in talks on another big project, directing Swamp Thing as part of James Gunn’s new DC movie universe. Neither Swamp Thing nor this Star Wars project has a date attached to them, but with Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney both looking to monopolize Mangold’s time, there’s a good chance one of these projects will give. And frankly, directing a horror-infused take on a plant-man seems more likely to happen than The 10 Commandments with Jedi.

   Likelihood Of Ever Existing: Not likely. Happy to be wrong, but there’s a chance this will go right on the shelf next to Waititi and Jenkins’ movies.