Six years, three writers and one pandemic after Lucasfilm announced it, Taika Waititi’s Star Wars film has been put in the freezer. Talking to Inverse while doing the rounds for Klara and the Sun, the director confirmed that he and screenwriter Tony McNamara have shelved it to work on something else together. Asked what that something else might be, he checked with his publicist, who replied that if he had to ask, the answer was no. Waititi’s own summary was admirably brief: “It’s very iced.”
He did leave the freezer lid ajar, observing that ice ages do eventually come to an end. Anyone who watched Han Solo spend the gap between two films decorating Jabba’s palace wall will recognise the optimism, and the likely timescale.
The project was unveiled on May the Fourth 2020, with Waititi directing and co-writing alongside Krysty Wilson-Cairns of 1917 and Last Night in Soho. Wilson-Cairns left in 2023, Waititi carried on alone, and later that year he joked, while handing Shawn Levy an award, that Levy might actually finish his Star Wars script before he did. It turned out to be prophecy rather than banter: Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter, with Ryan Gosling, is now dated for May 2027. Kathleen Kennedy then drafted in McNamara, the double Oscar nominee behind The Favourite, Poor Things and television’s The Great, and insisted Lucasfilm was happy to wait because Taika runs on Taika time. Time, it seems, has now run.
Waititi was hardly an outlandish choice. He directed the first season finale of The Mandalorian, voiced the droid IG-11, and told Variety as recently as January that he wanted to recapture some of the fun of the original trilogy. A Star Wars film with the deadpan of What We Do in the Shadows and the lunacy of Poor Things was a genuinely intriguing prospect, which is probably why nobody at Disney could quite work out where to put it.
It joins a crowded development freezer. Patty Jenkins’s Rogue Squadron has been circling the runway for years, Rian Johnson’s long-promised trilogy has gone very quiet, and The Playlist reports that James Mangold’s film is on hold too, all while Kennedy makes her exit and new hands take over the Lucasfilm slate. Waititi’s own stock could also use a lift. Klara and the Sun has just collected one-star reviews from the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph, which follows the lukewarm reception for Thor: Love and Thunder, and the director says he has about four other films on the go.
Perhaps it is for the best. Somewhere in a Lucasfilm vault there now sits a script by the man who made Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the man who wrote Poor Things, and it will grow more legendary precisely because nobody is allowed to read it. Every era of SF cinema needs its Jodorowsky’s Dune. Fittingly, Waititi has been attached since 2021 to adapt The Incal, Jodorowsky’s own comic. If that one ends up on ice as well, he could open his own branch of Iceland.
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