Waititi's Star Wars on ice proves Lucasfilm has no plan

How many Star Wars movies can you announce before the announcements become the product? Lucasfilm has been running that experiment for years, and the latest result is in: Taika Waititi's film, revealed in 2020, is on ice.

A freeze is how studios cancel without saying cancel

As Variety reports, Waititi confirmed while promoting other work that the project, in development since 2020, is officially on hold. According to netzwelt, he said (in the German outlet's wording, translated here) that it is "completely on ice" and that he is trying to work on four other films. He also said he is working with Lucasfilm on a different joint project. That outlet adds that a script had reportedly been finished, with Tony McNamara joining in 2025.

Waititi left a door ajar, since every ice age ends eventually, but nobody is promising a thaw, and no timeline has been given.

Let's be honest about the vocabulary. "On hold" after six years, with the director trying to juggle four other films, looks to us like a polite way to let a project fade. Whether Disney ever formally cancels it hardly matters. For audiences, the practical result is the same: nothing to plan around.

The pattern is the story, not this one film

The trouble isn't just this project. Netzwelt lists others that were announced and quietly buried: the Benioff and Weiss project about the early Jedi, and a film that Kevin Feige was meant to produce, dropped in 2023. Critics, it notes, see a pattern of pulling the plug at the first sign of production trouble, and of reacting very sensitively to box-office disappointments. The same piece describes The Mandalorian & Grogu as a flop this year.

We think that's the real story. It isn't that Waititi is flaky or that any individual idea was doomed. A studio with a genuine roadmap, in our view, doesn't let a flagship director's film drift for six years with no visible progress. Lucasfilm announces better than it delivers, and we suspect fans have started to notice.

Starfighter is carrying too much weight

According to the same netzwelt piece, the next theatrical test is Star Wars: Starfighter on May 28, 2027, set five years after Episode IX and starring Ryan Gosling. Meanwhile, the Daisy Ridley Rey film now has Jon Watts directing, but it was originally set for December 2026 and has no known shooting date.

So the picture is one dated movie, one undated one, and one frozen one. That's not a slate. It's a single bet with a lot of hope attached. If Starfighter works, the franchise looks healthy by default. If it stumbles after The Mandalorian & Grogu, we think the corporate nerves described above could freeze even more projects.

We'd argue Gosling and a fresh corner of the timeline are a smart pitch, and that's precisely why it's risky to make it the only dated one. A franchise shouldn't need every release to be a referendum.

Fewer reveals, more release dates

What should Lucasfilm do? Our prescription is boring, which is why it would work: stop announcing directors before there is a script and a window, and treat a release date as a commitment rather than a mood. Waititi's pitch, which games.ch says aimed to recapture the humor of the original films while telling a standalone story, may well have been worth making. We'll never know, and that's the cost of announcing early.

The reader's takeaway is simple. Be excited about Starfighter, but treat everything else on the Star Wars movie list as a promise with a press release attached until a camera is rolling. Waititi's film may return someday. Until Lucasfilm shows a plan, the smartest fan stance is patience, and the smartest studio move is silence until there is something real to show.