Patty Jenkins' Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is still alive because Wonder Woman 3 got canned
Don't get your hopes up though.
Star Wars fans know that Lucasfilm is a bit of a trigger-happy company when it comes to movies. The number of unmade theatrical releases increases every year. Patty Jenkins' Star Wars: Rogue Squadron became one of those in late 2022, as the director had her sights set on other movies first. But surprise, surprise! It turns out that Rogue Squadron isn't entirely dead yet.
Sometimes, the projects crumble apart due to creative differences. As for other cool-sounding movies, they never happen due to the filmmakers' busy schedules and the studio choosing to go in a different direction meanwhile. Regarding Jenkins, she once was busy with both Wonder Woman 3 and a Cleopatra biographical drama starring Gal Gadot. She departed the latter to focus on both the DC threequel and Star Wars, but WW3 also got canned in late 2022 as DC Studios shifted towards a full reboot of their shared universe efforts. So, what now? Back to work on Rogue Squadron, it seems.
Jenkins recently told host Ben Mankiewicz on the TCM/Max podcast, Talking Pictures (hat tip to Collider), that she had signed an agreement last year to return to a galaxy far, far away. "So, when I left Star Wars to do Wonder Woman 3 , I thought maybe I'll come back to Star Wars after Wonder Woman 3," she said, "So we did a deal for that to happen, started a deal, but I thought I was doing Wonder Woman. When that went away, Lucasfilm and I were like, oh, we gotta finish this deal. We finished the deal right as the strike was happening. So I now owe a draft of Star Wars and so we will see what happens there. You know, like, who knows?"
She doesn't sound too sure about the chances of her 'dream project' Top Gun-like movie ever taking off past the script phase, but that's just how modern Lucasfilm works. Beyond The Mandalorian & Grogu and the upcoming Rey Skywalker-led sequel, and maybe Dave Filoni's New Republic-era crossover movie that will tie up The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and more Disney+ series, everything on the dry theatrical side of Star Wars is far from locked down.
Rogue Squadron joins the "not quite dead, but close to" drawer full of long-in-the-works theatrical Star Wars projects led by Taika Waititi, Shawn Levy, Donald Glover, and Rian Johnson, among others. At the very least, it sounds like Lucasfilm is carefully evaluating all the options presented to them before committing to something as half-baked as 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.