Director Patty Jenkins is making strides in pre-production for her Star Wars debut as she zooms towards a December 2023 release date for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. She told The Hollywood Reporter that she’s “finishing” up a script, and already putting together a crew.
Jenkins also teased “a whole other way of working” as she spoke about her collaboration with the Star Wars brain trust, and said that they’re “pretty deep into” the process. In June 2021, Lucasfilm tapped writer Matthew Robinson as her co-collaborator on the project.
As Jenkins told THR:
“It’s going amazing. I had been on it already for six months before I even announced that, so we’re pretty deep into it. We’re finishing a script, crewing up, and it’s all going wonderful. I’m so excited about the story and excited that we’re the next chapter of Star Wars, which is such a responsibility and such an opportunity to really start some new things. It’s really exciting in that way.”
Jenkins, who revealed in the Rogue Squadron announcement video that she has a personal connection to the story, her father was an Air Force pilot, also added that she is “ fairly free” to make the film that she wants to.
“It’s an entirely different way of working. I’m on the phone with all of them and doing Zoom meetings with everybody involved in Star Wars all the time. I’m fairly free to do the story that we want to do, but you really need to know who’s done what, who’s doing what, where it goes and how it works, and what designs have been done before. It’s a whole other way of working that I’m getting up to speed on.”
Rogue Squadron marks a creative pivot for the Star Wars franchise after the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga in 2019. Disney and Lucasfilm are focussing on making standalone films, one of which will be directed by Thor: Ragnarok helmer Taika Waititi; another will be produced by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. Meanwhile, Rian Johnson is busy filming the Knives Out sequel in Greece, with both Disney and the director remaining non-committal about the status of his previously announced trilogy.
Jenkins and star Gal Gadot became hot property in Hollywood after the release and subsequent critical and commercial success of Wonder Woman in 2017. Reactions to the sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, were considerably less enthusiastic when it debuted in 2021. Nevertheless, Warner Bros confirmed that both Jenkins and Gadot would return for a third and final film in the trilogy. The director-actor duo is also working on a Cleopatra movie for Paramount, which Jenkins told Collider in January 2021 she was very “excited” about making.