It’s official! Taika Waititi writing/directing new Star Wars movie!

Back in January, the story broke that Lucasfilm was reportedly chatting to Taika Waititi about developing a new Star Wars film. We say “reportedly” because there was no official word on this from the Disney-owned studio, just some Hollywood hearsay. Well, it’s very official now!

In a Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you!) press release on the official Star Wars site, Lucasfilm confirmed that the recent Oscar-winner has been tapped to both write and direct a new Star Wars feature film. That’s not where the awards cred on this production ends though. Co-writing the script with Waititi will be recent Oscar-nominee Krysty Wilson-Cairns. Both had actually been on the bill for the same Oscars show in January, with Waititi winning Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit while Wilson-Cairns was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for 1917.

That Oscar win for Waititi had been just the latest flame-up in a massive hot streak after the New Zealand filmmaker went from being a cult acclaimed indie filmmaker behind such quirky productions as Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows to Hollywood blockbuster megastar with Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok in 2017. Ironically, back then Waititi actually stated publicly that he would rather make more Marvel movies for Disney than Star Wars movies, and now he’s getting to do both. He recently also acted in and directed episodes of The Mandalorian on Disney+ and is set to return for more in the second season of the live-action Star Wars TV series smash hit in August.

But with that and Waititi’s Ragnarok follow-up, Thor: Love and Thunder, currently only scheduled for release on 11 February 2022, it will still be a while before he gets around to this new Star Wars film though. Whatever this new film will be, that is. It’s all still a mystery as Lucasfilm have offered up absolutely zero details for now. Par for the course on Star Wars productions, unfortunately.

What Lucasfilm is spilling some beans on though is an official confirmation of another recent report. This being that Emmy-nominated Russian Doll creator Leslye Headland is developing a new live-action Star Wars TV series for Disney+, which she will write, executive produce and serve as showrunner on. This show will join the previously announced other two Star Wars live-action TV series in production: A prequel to Rogue One following Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor, and another that sees Ewan McGregor reprise his Star Wars Prequel Trilogy role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s recently been confirmed that the former will take place five years before the events of Rogue One, while the long-gestating Obi-Wan production will be set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope when the Jedi Master was hiding out on Tattooine.

As for the rest of Star Wars’ future, we still have no idea whether or not The Last Jedi filmmaker Rian Johnson’s planned new trilogy, set in a new corner of the universe, or the other trilogy that Game of Throne creators David Benioff and DB Weiss walked out on, are still being made. After the shake-up of Disney’s plans in the wake of Solo’s box office failure, I have a feeling that Lucasfilm will be avoiding announcing massive new trilogies for a while and we’ll just get more big-budget productions like The Mandalorian on the TV side with creator-driven standalone projects like whatever Waititi is cooking up in cinema. And honestly, I think the Force is strong in that approach.

Last Updated: May 5, 2020