The producer of Deadpool & Wolverine is working on a new Star Wars film trilogy, but there’s a catch
Star Wars: Rebels co-creator Simon Kinberg has been tasked to write and develop a new Star Wars film trilogy for Lucasfilm, The Hollywood Reporter unveiled today. The news may raise mixed feelings among Star Wars fans. On the one hand, Kinberg’s project sounds exactly what the fandom has been asking for. Very little information was given about the intent or direction of the new trilogy, but… THRAccording to sources, it will feature “brand new characters and a new story,” rather than being a continuation of the Skywalker Saga, which has dominated the film side of the Star Wars franchise.
On the other hand, Kinberg’s name is just one of many established creators working on future Star Wars projects, most of which Lucasfilm has announced with much fanfare and is rarely mentioned since.
Kinberg comes to the project with plenty of Star Wars experience; he is listed as a writer for 74 episodes of Rebels – and a lot of experience with fandom-oriented projects in general, although not always fan-favorite projects. He was a producer of Deadpool, Deadpool 2And Deadpool and Wolverineand on various X-Men film and TV projects and spin-offs, including the TV series Legion and the movie Logan. He was a frequent writer on the decidedly mixed slate of recent X-Men films, including X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: ApocalypseAnd X-Men: Dark Phoenix (which he also directed). He also wrote the 2015 script Fantastic four.
But the biggest reason to question this announcement isn’t its bona fides; it’s the other work currently on his plate: he reportedly is is also developing a new Star Trek film series with Paramountand IMDB (admittedly not always accurate about upcoming projects) shows him as a producer on nine different projects currently in development, pre-production or production, including the screen adaptations of Andy Weir’s novel Artemis (its sequel to The Martianwhich Kinberg also co-produced), Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyneand Stephen King’s The running man (directed by Shaun of the Dead‘s Edgar Wright). That’s a lot of irons for anyone to have in the fire.
That speaks to Lucasfilm’s continued habit of tapping extremely busy creatives – Rian Johnson, Taika Waititi, Damon Lindelof, James Mangold, Game of Thrones‘ David Benioff and DB Weiss, and more – to work on Star Wars projects that never come to fruition. So add this new theoretical trilogy to that roster, but take it with a grain of salt – which should be the strategy at this point when a new Star Wars project is announced. Until there is actually a trailer, a poster, a release date or something ‘What it was supposed to be and why it was canceled’ cover storyit’s one for the maybe someday checklist, and not much else.