On Tuesday, Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss announced that they’re stepping away from their plans to make a mysterious Star Wars trilogy, explaining that their new obligations to Netflix meant that they couldn’t give Star Wars the attention it would need. The next day, we got a much more believable reason: That Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy specifically didn’t like that they were planning to work on both Star Wars movies and high-profile Netflix projects all at once, and their Netflix deal reportedly included a stipulation that they be present on set of any shows they produce for the streaming service, making it essentially impossible to actually pay attention to both. Plus, Benioff and Weiss aren’t exactly super popular on the internet these days, and opening themselves up to the scrutiny of Star Wars fans is just asking for even more pressure. Basically, it was less of a scheduling issue and more of a… entertainment industry politics issue.
Either way, a Variety report has some information on what might have been, and it sounds like the rumors that their movies would take place after the so-called “Skywalker saga” were off-base. Instead, their trilogy would’ve been about “how the Jedi came to exist,” presumably taking place untold generations before the prequel movies (since those took place long after the Jedi order had more or less fully vanquished its Sith enemies and settled into foolish complacency). That’s about all we know in terms of specifics, but the Variety story also claims that Benioff and Weiss might’ve been victims of a desire at Lucasfilm to avoid “new ideas” in favor of “old standbys.” It notes that Benioff and Weiss saw their “visions for the films” split off from what Lucasfilm expected at some point, presumably adding to the growing rift.
That being said, Rian Johnson is apparently still working on his mysterious Star Wars trilogy, and he’s the one who made The Last Jedi. That one had all sorts of new ideas about what Star Wars could be, and Lucasfilm clearly isn’t interested in cutting him off like Benioff and Weiss, but Variety implies that his breaks from Star Wars tradition might be a little over-exaggerated (it says that he “has maintained that he had creative freedom,” suggested that maybe he didn’t, but it doesn’t go any further). Still, the point is that Benioff and Weiss aren’t making any Star Wars movies now, and we’ll probably never know exactly what happened.