Lucasfilm is getting started on a new Star Wars trilogy, with Episode X to be directed by Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Jon Watts, a report suggests.
There was a seven year gap between The Rise Of Skywalker and this years The Mandalorian And Grogu, and the latter wasn’t quite the triumphant return to cinemas Lucasfilm might have hoped. Still, Lucasfilm has next year’s Star Wars: Starfighter to come, plus there’s been talk for a while of a new trilogy of sequels.
If a new report’s accurate, then the studio’s found the director who’s going to shoulder the first of those sequels: Jon Watts, most famous for his Spider-Man films. He’ll shoot a script by writer-producer Simon Kinberg, who was reported to have been working away on episodes X, XI and XII as long ago as November 2024.
The word back then was that Kinberg’s trilogy would bring back Daisy Ridley as Rey, making her the seasoned mentor to a new generation of trainee Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi style.
Confusingly, this isn’t the only Rey-centric sequel being worked on at Lucasfilm. Last year, we spoke to screenwriter George Nolfi, who in February 2025 had just been hired to write New Jedi Order – director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s long-trailed film that is also meant to star Daisy Ridley.
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There had been stories going around for a while that Lucasfilm had multiple productions in early stages, all featuring Daisy Ridley in some form, with the studio’s idea being, presumably, that it would pick the one it liked best.
According to this new report from Knight Edge Media, New Jedi Order has since been shelved in favour of Kinberg’s Episode X. (That sounds like an awful lot of duplicate work going to waste, but what would we know.)
The other bit of the story is that, after years of stasis on the cinema front, Lucasfilm is now keen to get Episode X going as quickly as possible, and that Watts could begin shooting the sequel as soon as next year.
Watts is no stranger to heading up huge, effects-filled productions, having made the Spider-Man Home trilogy into huge box office successes. He was also co-creator on Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, a charmingly Amblin-esque TV series which, as we’ve previously argued on these pages, would arguably have worked better as a movie than a stretched-out small-screen narrative.
None of this has officially been confirmed by Lucasfilm as yet, it’s worth noting, though The Hollywood Reporter‘s decision to run with the story suggests there’s some truth to it. But with Starfighter marking the Star Wars franchise’s 50th anniversary next may, the studio will surely want to announce some kind of roadmap soon, if only to reassure Disney’s shareholders that it isn’t letting one of the biggest names in entertainment dwindle from public consciousness.
Star Wars: Starfighter opens in UK cinemas on the 28th May 2027.
