Damon Lindelof has finally spoken about his scrapped Star Wars Rey movie, and it sounds like it was going to be another Hollywood lecture about fandom.
For years, Lucasfilm has struggled to figure out what exactly comes next for the Star Wars sequel trilogy era. The Rey-focused film first announced by Kathleen Kennedy at Star Wars Celebration in 2023 — complete with Daisy Ridley being brought out on stage to loud applause — has since become one of the most troubled projects in the franchise’s history. Writers have come and gone, rumors of rewrites have swirled for years, and production appears to have slowed to a crawl.
Now, former Rey movie writer Damon Lindelof has finally revealed what his version of the film was actually going to be about, and reading between the lines, it sounds remarkably similar to the kind of “toxic fandom” discourse that many longtime Star Wars fans have grown exhausted by over the last decade.
Damon Lindelof revealed that his version of the Rey #NewJediOrder movie would’ve explored the clash between nostalgia & moving Star Wars forward.
He worked on the project for 2 years! Rey, Finn & Poe were intended to become “the center of Star Wars.” pic.twitter.com/B5bDNmY7jm
— New Jedi Order Updates (@NJO_Updates) May 19, 2026
Speaking on The Ringer-Verse’s “House of R” podcast, Lindelof reflected on his time attached to the project and admitted he was eventually fired from the film.
“And just to talk about the Bantha in the room, I was fired off of a Star Wars movie,” he said. “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. And so I was wrong, at least through that time.”
Lindelof had been developing the project alongside Justin Britt-Gibson (Lanterns) and Rayna McClendon (Willow). The movie would have reportedly brought Rey back following The Rise of Skywalker while exploring the future of the Jedi Order.
Lindelof’s Comments Sound Strikingly Familiar
The most revealing part of Lindelof’s comments came when he explained the thematic conflict at the center of his story.
“What we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie,” he added, “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. And let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars.”
That line immediately raised eyebrows among fans online because it sounds less like a traditional Star Wars adventure and more like a meta-commentary on the franchise’s fanbase itself.
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For years now, Lucasfilm creatives and entertainment media outlets have repeatedly framed criticism of the sequel trilogy as resistance to “change,” “revision,” or moving beyond nostalgia for the Original Trilogy. Lindelof’s framing appears to fit directly into that same ongoing debate.
He continued: “And it didn’t work… And so you get —you have your cake and eat it too, but the conversation that the fandom is having without winking and looking at the audience…that didn’t necessarily feel that risky.”
Again, many fans are likely going to interpret this as another example of Star Wars creatives trying to make the audience itself part of the story rather than simply telling a compelling standalone narrative.
Lucasfilm Still Doesn’t Seem To Know What Star Wars Is
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Lindelof’s interview was how openly uncertain he sounded about the franchise’s direction overall.
“I may have been fired not just because they seemed to like the premise,” he said. “It was just that the writing was really hard. It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was with to episode nine. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? They’re so massive. They’re so big.”
That uncertainty has become one of the defining characteristics of modern Lucasfilm. Since The Rise of Skywalker released in 2019, the studio has announced numerous theatrical projects that either stalled, lost directors, changed writers, or vanished entirely.
Rey from Star Wars – Disney+
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Meanwhile, The Mandalorian unexpectedly became the center of the franchise’s momentum.
Lindelof even acknowledged that shift directly.
“When episode seven came out, we all knew what it was… It was Rey, and it was Finn, and it was Poe,” he said. “And it was like all these, and then we were migrating back in, Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those guys. But we’ve got the sense that when this new 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, is Mando, are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars now?” Lindelof added.
And honestly, that question may explain why the Rey movie continues to struggle.
Adam Driver as Ben Solo kisses Daisy Ridley as Rey in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm spent years attempting to position the sequel trilogy characters as the future of the franchise, yet much of the audience gravitated toward legacy characters. If this Damon Lindelof version of the Rey movie was going to directly tackle the divide between nostalgia-driven fans and newer revisionist ideas inside the story itself, it’s easy to see why many fans would view it as another lecture rather than an escape into the galaxy far, far away.
At this point, the Rey movie feels less like the future of Star Wars and more like a bullet dodged by a franchise trapped in an identity crisis it still hasn’t solved.
What do you think about Damon Lindelof and his comments on the Rey movie? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
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