Damon Lindelof admitted this week that the “Star Wars” movie he was fired from writing after two years just wasn’t working out.
In 2022, Lindelof was announced as one of the writers of an untitled “Star Wars” movie that would follow Daisy Ridley’s Rey after the events of 2019’s “Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker” as she attempts to build a new Jedi Order. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was tapped to direct the project, which Lindelof was signed to co-write with Justin Britt-Gibson.
In 2023, however, it was announced that “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight had been hired to replace Lindelof and Britt-Gibson. Three years later, Lindelof opened up on a Monday episode of the “House of R” podcast about his experiences working on and being “fired” from the project.
“They asked me, ‘What do you think a ‘Star Wars’ movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired,’ and then two years later, I was fired,” Lindelof candidly admitted. “So I was wrong, at least through that prism.”
“They seemed to like the premise. It was just that the writing was really hard. It was slow — the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to [‘Rise of Skywalker’], ‘Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it all of those things?’ They’re so massive,” Lindelof added. “This thing, it’s sort of like the tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit.”
You can listen to Lindelof’s full comments on the subject in the video below.
haven’t seen this brought up anywhere else, but Damon Lindelof finally opened up on his cancelled Star Wars movie. Still unfortunate there has been no updates for New Jedi Order, even with a new writer attached as of last year. pic.twitter.com/GWWitiEasJ
— Matthew R.™ (@ItsJustMatthewR) May 19, 2026
Lindelof said that his and Britt-Gibson’s script for the film would have addressed the same “conversation that the [‘Star Wars’] fandom is having without winking and looking at the audience.” He added that, at the time, “That didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
“What we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say, ‘There is a Force of Nostalgia and there is a Force of Revision and they are at odds with one another. Let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside ‘Star Wars,’” Lindelof explained, noting, “it didn’t work.”
The “Lost” and “Leftovers” creator, who has HBO and DC’s “Lanterns” premiering later this year, said that “Star Wars” has found itself in a place where both creatives like him and casual fans have been left looking for “the center of ‘Star Wars.’” That’s a question, he said, that has only been made clearer by the forthcoming release of Lucasfilm’s “The Mandalorian and Grogu.”
“When [‘The Force Awakens’] came out, we all knew what it was. It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe, and then we were migrating back in Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those guys,” Lindelof observed. “But we got the sense that when [that] trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the center of ‘Star Wars.’ The new question is, ‘Are Mando and Grogu the center of ‘Star Wars’ now?’”
