It’s a game of musical screenwriters over at Lucasfilm. In the wake of the shelving of Patty Jenkins’ and Kevin Feige’s Star Wars projects, yet another Star Wars film has changed hands. Last fall, news broke that Damon Lindelof (Watchmen) was writing a Star Wars screenplay with a co-writer who was later learned to be Justin Britt-Gibson (The Strain).
The film still has Ms. Marvel‘s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy as director, but Lindelof and Britt-Gibson have left the project—to be swiftly replaced by Peaky Blinders creator Steve Knight.
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Does that seem like a weird one to you? It seems like a weird one to me. Knight has other credits, but is arguably best known for Peaky Blinders, and for writing things like Eastern Promises. He also created the Apple TV+ series See and wrote the Princess Diana film Spencer, along with the fairly cornball Amazing Grace. So there’s some range there, sure.
Rumors have been swirling about Lindelof’s departure since an interview with Slashfilm earlier this month, when he sounded a bit less than fully enthused about the project: “I will just say, that for reasons that I can’t get into on this Sunday morning, on this day, the degree of difficulty is extremely, extremely, extremely high.”
According to Variety, Lindelof and Britt-Gibson turned in a draft of their screenplay early this year, then left the film in February. What this means for their story—is Knight working from their screenplay, or starting fresh?—is not known, but Above the Line says the title and brief summary will be announced at Star Wars Celebration next month, which suggests there is some certainty as to what the film is about.
I just want to go see a Star War, but patience we must have.
