Disney chucks another writer at the Rey Star Wars movie

Disney’s total inability to get a new Star Wars movie made in the five years since The Rise Of Skywalker has gone from an oddity, to a point of hilarity, to a stone-cold Hollywood fact: Excepting next year’s The Mandalorian & Grogu, which comes with the pop culture might of the most successful of the studio’s Disney+ Star Wars TV shows behind it, the Star Wars film properties have seemed largely cursed ever since Palpatine returned, and then went away again very quickly due to… Force bond magic? (We’ll be honest: We haven’t revisited Rise since December 2019, so details have gotten a bit hazy.) That especially goes for the Daisy Ridley follow-up based around her character Rey, which has now burnt through multiple attempted writers, and has now had another one tossed at it, in the form of The Bourne Ultimatum and The Adjustment Bureau‘s George Nolfi.

This is per THR, which reports that Nolfi—whose knack for figuring out things to keep Matt Damon busy also extends to writing Ocean’s Twelve—will take on a job previously tackled by Damon Lindelof, Justin Britt-Gibson, and Steven Knight. None of whom appear to have been able to come up with a further plotline for Rey now that she finally has a last name to put down on all her various space-forms. (Personally, we’d watch a film about her increasingly brazen attempts to scam Luke and Leia’s estates as the “Skywalker heir,” but this might seem tonally off-message.)

Out of all the Star Wars movies that have been announced and not made in the last half-decade (most recently, the supposed one being cooked up between Deadpool & Wolverine‘s Shawn Levy and Ryan Gosling), this might be the one that’s the most baffling in its inability to get off the ground: Rey was the lynchpin of the entire sequel trilogy—which did, we feel like it’s worth remembering, make Disney enormous amounts of money, even Rise—so you’d assume another movie featuring her would be a slam dunk. Maybe Nolfi will find a way to crack it, possibly by reimagining Daisy Ridley as Matt Damon, and just allowing the creative juices to flow.