Another new beginning
Jon Watts will reportedly helm the next Star Wars film
It looks like we'll soon know what direction Lucasfilm will be taking Star Wars. Deadline and other trades have reported that the studio has tapped director Jon Watts for Episode X, which is being billed as a continuation of what's now become known as the Skywalker Saga – the mainline storyline that began with George Lucas's Star Wars in 1977, and which came to an end with J.J. Abram's The Rise of Skywalker in 2019.
While there are a whole bunch of projects in the pipeline, we've known that there was a new trilogy in the works for the franchise: Simon Kinberg, who's worked on everything from the X-Men franchise to The Martian to creating Star Wars: Rebels, was tapped in 2024 to develop a new trilogy of films, which at the time were said to be thought of as Episodes 10, 11, and 12.
Andrew Liptak
That now seems to be the case and Watts coming onboard feels like a notable development, in that a) it's moved along far enough in the developmental pipeline to warrant getting a film up and running and 2) he seems like an ideal choice for this sort of thing, even if we've been down this road before.
Let me take the second part first: Watts has a resume that feels ideal to helm a story in an established franchise. He helmed the first three Spider-man films in the MCU (Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home, all of which did really well at the box office) and he's done some other non-IP films in the form of Clown, Cop Car, and AppleTV's Wolfs (a perfectly serviceable streaming thriller). He's not what I'd call a splashy director – certainly not someone who stands out with a unique look like prior SW directors like Gareth Edwards or Rian Johnson, (or other genre directors like Neill Blomkamp or Denis Villeneuve), but his work is perfectly serviceable for conveying not only legible action on a screen, but the regular human moments that crop up between them.
Most importantly for this development, he's got a lot of experience with the franchise: he was the showrunner and director for the streaming series Skeleton Crew, which can be summed up as "Goonies meets Star Wars." The show earned a good amount of acclaim and appreciation for for its use of stop motion and other traditional techniques that made it feel like a classic Star Wars story, and it probably wasn't helped by arriving at the tail end of the glut of other shows.
As a result, it didn't break out in the way that the first seasons of The Mandalorian did and wasn't as visionary or transformative as Andor was, but also wasn't lacking in quality as The Book of Boba Fett or The Mandalorian's third season were and wasn't out there enough to earn the ire of trollish viewers like The Acolyte did. It's somewhere in the middle: a perfectly serviceable entry in the series and will probably get some periodic revisits and reevaluations as time goes on.
Andrew Liptak
Back in 2025, I wrote up some impressions about the announcements that came out of Celebration Japan: with films like The Mandalorian & Grogu and Star Wars: Starfighter on the way, it felt as though Lucasfilm's immediate priority was to hit that safe middle of the road where they'd hit the classic beats for the older fans, while also not trying anything too out there to piss them off.
The Mandalorian & Grogu turned out to be just that: a safe adventure with some familiar characters that ultimately didn't have much to say or do in the bigger scheme of things. We'll find out next year how Star Wars: Starfighter will measure up. That's being directed by Shawn Levy, who's also got a string of crowd-pleasing, self-aware, and high-earning blockbusters in his resume, and I'm setting my expectations around the level of "it won't do anything mind blowing, but it'll be fun to watch."
Kathleen Kennedy recently sat for an interview and was asked about her tenure as Lucasfilm's president. She noted it was a relief to step down, in part because of the challenge that a Star Wars film brings: “I think that that’s the challenge that all franchises [face], certainly something that’s been around now for 50 years. You’ve got people where this means a lot to them. But at the same time, the challenge is to try to create something new, something original. So finding that balance is really the toughest thing.”
A long-running franchise is an unenviable balancing act: fandoms can be vocal and their displeasure can taint a project before it gets up off the ground. I can understand the desire to take a slightly safer path: throughout the entire Disney era, Lucasfilm produced a lot of material and some of those lofty, transformational, or introspective attempts fell short, weren't realized, or were prohibitively expensive, all drawing down the goodwill or benefit of doubt that the Star Wars logo has long since promised.
I think that helps to explain why we haven't really seen much of an overall direction since The Rise of Skywalker hit theaters: when you have a literal blank slate where you can take the franchise in any different direction you'd like, it's hard to strike that balance between what fandom wants and really taking advantage of the creativity of your filmmakers and storytellers. Where do you go from there?
Watts feels like a solid but safe choice for relaunching the franchise: someone who's adept at working in an existing environment and who won't rock the boat too much, but can push it just enough that it feels fresh. We've been down this road that we've been down before when J.J. Abrams helmed The Force Awakens. It was a familiar-but-different revival that had the right beats and fan-pleasing moments with an updated coat of paint, and which handed off the baton to another team of filmmakers who could have built on that new environment – if only they'd taken out the time to figure out the bigger, overarching story.
Hopefully, with Kinberg developing the longer arc, we'll see what Lucasfilm wasn't able to do the first time around: build a grand story that has something to say and takes the world in interesting new places. If it materializes, we'll have to figure out what to to call this one: Prequel, Original, Sequel.... the Successor trilogy?