Two Star Wars Films Just Reappeared on Paper. Neither Has a Date.

Production Weekly is not a news outlet. It is a paid listings service, the industry equivalent of a noticeboard, and a project appearing on it means somebody entered it into a database. That is the whole event. And yet issue #1518, dated 3 September, is the most interesting thing to happen to the Star Wars film slate since May.

Listed: Star Wars: New Jedi Order, the Daisy Ridley film that has been in development since 2022. And an untitled Dave Filoni Star Wars film, announced from a Celebration stage in April 2023 and effectively unmentioned since.

No Disney statement. No trade has matched it. Treat it accordingly — but treat it, because of what it sits next to.

Kennedy talked about six Star Wars films on her way out. Neither of these was one of them.

Kathleen Kennedy stepped down as Lucasfilm president on 15 January 2026 after fourteen years, handing the job to Filoni as President and Chief Creative Officer. Her exit interview was unusually specific about the slate — page counts, delivered drafts, verdicts:

• James Mangold's Dawn of the Jedi: "Jim Mangold and Beau Willimon wrote an incredible script, but it is definitely breaking the mold, and it's on hold."
• Taika Waititi: "Taika has turned in a script that I think is hilarious and great."
• Simon Kinberg's trilogy: the furthest along, a treatment of roughly 70 pages.
• Donald Glover's Lando: script delivered.
• The Ben Solo film: "Anything's a possibility if somebody's willing to take a risk."

She did not mention the Rey film. She did not mention Filoni's film. Those were the only two Lucasfilm had ever announced with a director attached and, in one case, a returning star already cast. Eight months later, they are the two that turned up on the noticeboard.

Read that as Filoni rescuing his own orphans, or as a slate with nothing else ready. Both readings are available.

The calendar tells the harder story

Since The Rise of Skywalker opened in December 2019, Disney has held and then vacated Star Wars release dates in December 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027. The December 2026 slot went to Ice Age 6. The December 2027 slot went to Avengers: Secret Wars.

For the first time in the Disney era there is no December Star Wars date on the calendar at all. The only dated original film in the entire pipeline is Star Wars: Starfighter, 28 May 2027 — directed by Shawn Levy, a filmmaker from outside the Lucasfilm system, starring Ryan Gosling as a character named Kade Auberon, set five years after the sequel trilogy, connected to nothing.

Meanwhile, the Mandoverse's theatrical debut is the franchise's lowest grosser

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened 22 May 2026 on a $165 million budget:

• Four-day Memorial Day opening: $98 million. The Sunday estimate of $102 million is still circulating and is wrong.
• Worldwide final: $345.8 million — $47 million short of Solo's $392.9 million, making it the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars film ever released.
• Rotten Tomatoes 60%; Metacritic 53; CinemaScore A−; PostTrak 71% recommend.
• Second weekend: down roughly 69–70%, the steepest Disney-era Star Wars drop.

An A− and a 70% cliff in the same fortnight is not a word-of-mouth problem. The people who showed up liked it. The problem was how few of them there were. Worth noting against the wider record, too, since the franchise's all-time box office lead has been narrowing for other reasons entirely.

The one cameo money can't buy, in the film fewest people bought a ticket for

Martin Scorsese — the director who spent several years arguing in public that studio tentpoles are not cinema — appears in The Mandalorian and Grogu as Hugo Durant, a fry cook. It was the most-discussed thing about the movie. The movie was the least-attended thing in the franchise. Lucasfilm landed the stunt casting of the decade and attached it to the smallest audience it has ever had.

Two fiftieth anniversaries, and neither lands on the anniversary

Disney has two separate 50th-birthday plays in 2027. The restored theatrical re-release of A New Hope is dated 19 February 2027. Starfighter opens 28 May 2027, and Levy said at D23 in August: "I am so honored to release this film on the same weekend that the original film opened 50 years earlier."

The original opened on 25 May 1977. So the commemorative re-release arrives three months before the thing it commemorates, and the anniversary weekend itself goes to the new movie. The party is in February. The birthday is in May. The present is a Ryan Gosling film.

What is actually known, and what is noise

• Known: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directs New Jedi Order; Ridley returns as Rey; George Nolfi is the writer, hired January 2025 — the fourth on the project after Damon Lindelof, Justin Britt-Gibson and Steven Knight.
• Known: Ahsoka Season 2 is dated 20 January 2027.
• Not known: whether New Jedi Order has a greenlight, a start date, a budget, a supporting cast or a release date. It has none of those.
• Not a date: "17 December 2027" is circulating on listings sites for the Rey film. It came from a database entry, not from Disney, and that slot belongs to Marvel.
• Not confirmed: reports that The Mandalorian Season 4 has been scrapped. No primary source exists either way.

Filoni's own line on how he plans the slate, given at the Mandalorian and Grogu premiere, is more revealing than any listing: "For me right now, rather than dealing with hard numbers like that, I'm just looking at the stories and the potential and planning what I'd like to do." He was promoted on the strength of a connected universe. The only Star Wars film currently on the calendar is connected to nothing.