Jon Watts has tapped to direct the next Star Wars film in the franchise.
The Hollywood Reporter is stating from sources that the director of the billion dollar blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Home will be taking the reigns of a Star Wars film which reportedly will be the first installment of a new trilogy in the ongoing Skywalker Saga. Screenwriter Simon Kinberg has been working on the screenplay for this film and the two subsequent installments to follow.
Watts and Kinberg are no strangers to the Star Wars galaxy. Watts was a co-creator of the Disny+ Star Wars series Skeleton Crew and directed two of the series’s eight episodes. Kinberg was a co-creator of the animated series Star Wars: Rebels and scripted a number of the keystone episodes in the show’s four-year run.
The Reporter cautions that the film has not yet been given a greenlight by parent company Disney, but “it seems to be project the furthest along the development track.” No other details about the project have been reported on outside of Star Wars sequel trilogy star Daisy Ridley’s character of Rey being some part of the story.
Currently, Lucasfilm is working on finishing Star Wars: Starfighter, directed by Shawn Levy and featuring Ryan Gosling, which will premier next summer as part of the company’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars film.
Previously, in addition to the news that Kinberg was working on a trilogy of Star Wars films, it was announced at the 2023 Star Wars Celebration convention that Ms. Marvel director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was attached to an in development film that would see the return of Ridley’s Rey in a story set some fifteen years after the events of the sequel trilogy. There is no word as to whether this project is still in development and would somehow connect to the Watts-directed films or if it has fallen by the wayside.
