Patty Jenkins’ long gestating Star Wars: Rogue Squadron film is allegedly being retooled into a TV series according to the latest rumor.
ComicBookMovie.com reports that scooper MyTimeToShineH claims that Lucasfilm is retooling the film into a TV series.
The project has seemingly never gotten off the ground since it was announced back in December 2020 with Disney CEO Bob Iger stating, “We are thrilled to have the great Patty Jenkins directing our Star Wars feature film Rogue Squadron, and as a true admirer of her work, it is an honor to have Patty directing her next film for us!”
A few days after the announcement, Jenkins claimed the film had been in the works for awhile. She told Collider, “We’re very far into the — we’re finishing the treatment basically, which is pretty big. So it ends up being like where you’re fairly close to a well-along screenplay by the time I’m done with the treatment in my process. So yeah, we’ve been working on it for awhile. It’s going great. I’m super excited about it. I’m super excited about the story.”
However, in June 2021, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Matthew Robinson was hired to write a screenplay and he was “currently furiously keyboarding away on a draft.”
By November 2021, it was reported that the film had been indefinitely delayed due to scheduling conflicts with her Cleopatra and the now-scrapped Wonder Woman 3 movie.
However, in December 2021, Variety reported that Jenkins was stepping away from the Cleopatra film to put more focus on Wonder Woman 3 and Rogue Squadron.
By May 2022, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair the film had been “pushed off to the side for the moment.” She added, “Patty is developing the script further. Then we will talk about how that connects to the central spine that we’re working on.”
By March 2023, it was being reported that the film had been shelved again. Variety claimed, “sources with knowledge of the production say it is no longer in active development at the studio.”
A month later, Kennedy indicated the project was still on the table, but could also be adapted into a TV series. She told IGN, “Rogue Squadron, that definitely is something that we still talk about. Whether it’s a movie, or whether it ends up being in the series space, that’s definitely something.”
In March 2024, Jenkins announced a new deal with Lucasfilm to make the Rogue Squadron film after Wonder Woman 3 fell apart at Warner Bros. She said on the Talking Pictures Podcast:
When I left Star Wars to do Wonder Woman 3, and I started working on that, we talked about, ‘Well, maybe I’ll come back to Star Wars after Wonder Woman 3,’ So we started a deal for that to happen. So when Wonder Woman 3 went away, Lucasfilm and I were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to finish this deal.’ We finished the deal right as the strike was beginning. So I now owe a draft of Star Wars. So we will see what happens there. Who knows? They have a hard job in front of them of, ‘What’s the first movie [since the sequel trilogy] they’re going to do?’ They have other directors who have been working, but I am now back on doing Rogue Squadron. We’ll see what happens. We need to get it to where we’re both super happy with it.
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There should be a single word that means "a film so bad they rework it into a series to dump on D+".
"Patty is developing the script further..." This is NOT a good sign. Jenkins is not this amazing director she's been marketed to be;. WONMDER WOMAN was good less due to her work then of others. She's fine at directing but someone else needs to be doing the writing duties. Jenkins showed the world just how awful she is with writing when that 1984 bomb dropped. I'm one who is VERY easy to please when it comes to films and even I have seen this movie only twice b/c of just how bad it is.
If I had to wager I bet Igor told Kennedy no to the film idea and so she then came back with the idea of doing a Disney+ series instead. That might be something Igor would be willing to go for since D+ needs content and because in theory you can get more for your dollar since the marketing costs are much less and because you can get more minutes of content thru a series then a film. I can Bob shooting down a RIOGUES film but greenlighting a D+ series version. Doesn't mean it will be better by any means just longer.
Personally I don't think female writers should be doing Star Wars., Not because no woman can do it right but b/c too many of them are feminists these days and they want to feminize everything and STAR WARS is an action space opera and not a love story. You let one of these feminist female writers take a stab at it and you could end up with 2.5 hours worth of 2+ women sitting around drinking wine and talking about each others feelings. The only good SW D+ content IMHO is MANDO (until season 3), ANDOR, THE BAD BATCH and SKELETON CREW. I do love CLONE WARS and REBELS but I don't consider those D+ content since there did not debut on D+. Everything else has been anywhere from absolute crap to disappointing.