ovie-making these days is a very expensive endeavour. In 1977, George Lucas's Star Wars cost $11m to make, which would be approximately $60m in today's money, and has since amassed $775m at the global box office, including rereleases. Fast forward to 2026 and the most recent film in the long-running space saga, The Mandalorian and Grogu, cost a reported $165m and brought in $346m worldwide. If there was ever a Hollywood gold rush, the mines ran dry long ago.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Disney-owned Lucasfilm seems to be so terrified of making new Star Wars movies. Since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker, only one Star Wars film, the aforementioned Mando and Grogu movie, has actually made it into cinemas. But that has not stopped the studio announcing a small armada of other projects – sometimes via press release, more often at various high-profile celebrations, conferences or other corporate jamborees – that have so far failed to reach multiplexes.
This week, Taika Waititi revealed in an interview with Inverse that his proposed Star Wars film, announced six years ago, has been "put on ice". No clear explanation was offered, but frankly nobody should be surprised. It now joins mooted projects from Patty Jenkins, Kevin Feige and Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss on the list of Star Wars movies that we were once told we were definitely (probably) getting, but that we never actually did. Some, such as Rian Johnson's proposed trilogy, have spent years receding into the distance, while others – Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's film about Rey's new Jedi order, anyone? – have never been officially cancelled.
The failure of Waititi's project may be the most damaging of the lot. Why hire a film-maker with such distinctive, punky sensibilities, only to leave them announcing to the world that their movie is now frozen in carbonite? Surely Lucasfilm teed up this film in the first place because it thought it might be an idea to shift away from dynastic daddy issues and planet-sized weapons with inexplicable design flaws, towards something whose plot couldn't be guessed halfway through the opening crawl?
There is every chance that Waititi's movie would have focused on an annoyingly genial Kiwi stormtrooper who insists on interrupting vital lightsaber duels to ask whether anyone fancies a sandwich. Johnson might have delivered 500 minutes of space opera in which the Jedi council are eventually forced to admit that the feeling of a disturbance in the Force is usually just trapped wind. But at least nobody watching the opening crawl would have known what kind of Star Wars movie they were about to witness – and that alone would have been worth the price of entry.
At some point, Lucasfilm has to let somebody make one of these films that might go wrong. Familiar faces and established audiences did not guarantee Mando and Grogu the kind of triumphant return we all wanted to see, and bringing back the saga's big bad, Emperor Palpatine, more than three decades after he fell down an Imperial reactor shaft, was very far from a smart move. The forthcoming Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling, may yet surprise us, but any film that already has Star Wars in its title and still needs one of Hollywood's most famous faces to get us through the door isn't exactly venturing into the Outer Rim.
Surely somewhere out there in a galaxy far, far away is a film-maker who can bring something fresh to this venerable old saga. Disney needs to find them, commission them to make a movie, and then actually let them get on and do it.