Patty Jenkins’ Star Wars movie is apparently back on

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins recently appeared on TCM and Max’s Talking Pictures podcast and dropped a surprising bit of news: Her Star Wars spin-off movie, Rogue Squadron, has apparently been un-canceled. Disney hasn’t officially taken the movie off the proverbial shelf, but Jenkins says she and Lucasfilm worked out a deal “right as the strike was beginning,” so now she owes the studio a new draft of the Rogue Squadron screenplay.

She knows that doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen, or that it will happen any time soon (“they have other directors who have been working,” she notes), but she’s back on it and now she says she just needs to get the screenplay to a place where she and Lucasfilm are “both super happy with it.”

This is the latest whiplash-inducing turn in a long string of whiplash-inducing turns for both Rogue Squadron and Jenkins’ entire career. She made her feature debut with Monster in 2003, the movie that got Charlize Theron an Oscar, and when they finally let her make another movie—14 years later—it was Wonder Woman and it made more than $800 million. She deservedly got Warner Bros. to write an enormous check for the sequel, including a big cut of the movie’s profits, but then the studio released the movie simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max during the pandemic (a move she called “heartbreaking,” even if she understood the justification).

Then, Lucasfilm gave her a dream project with Rogue Squadron, a movie about the pilots of the Star Wars universe that would be inspired by the death of her father (who was a pilot). The project got delayed pretty early in development, allowing Jenkins to make room in her schedule for Wonder Woman 3, but then Wonder Woman 3 got canceled as part of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s decision to completely overhaul the DC Comics movie universe, seemingly giving her a chance to go back to Rogue Squadron… but then Lucasfilm put it on the aforementioned shelf, and it seemed like the project was actually dead.

But god forbid Patty Jenkins make a Hollywood blockbuster without getting jerked around, because based on what she said in this podcast appearance about making a deal right before the strike, that means it happened within about two months (at most) of when we heard that Lucasfilm had given up on Rogue Squadron. Whatever, as long as she gets to make a movie at some point. We know know it’s difficult for Hollywood to commit to this, since she is—gasp—a woman, but god damn.