In 2022, fans of prestige genre drama got the surprise of their lives: Damon Lindelof, one of the minds behind projects like LOST, The Leftovers, and HBO’s Watchmen, would be writing and directing a new Star Wars movie. Then, just about a year later, they got another surprise: Lindeloff had been taken off the project, though no immediate cause was provided. The thing is, though, Lindelof has his own opinion regarding his sudden trip to the proverbial Sarlaac pit, and now, he’s sharing it.
That opinion came up during an appearance Lindelof made on The Ringer-Verse YouTube channel, which featured a wide range of Star Wars discussions. At one point, Lindelof decided to “address the bantha in the room” and talk about his firing off of the 2022 Lucasfilm project.
“They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong, at least through that prism.”
But what was Lindelof “wrong” about? What idea did Lucasfilm feel didn’t work for them anymore? Well, it wasn’t one that Lindelof himself considered all that precarious.
“What we were attempting to do,” he continued, “My partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon and I, […] was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision. And they are at odds with one another. Let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. It didn’t work. [We wanted to have] the conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
Well, okay, Damon, but I will point out that the Star Wars fanbase can get kind of… passionate… about what does and doesn’t work in a movie, so in a way, making any movie set in the Galaxy Far, Far Away is kind of a gamble. That’s without the religious aspect of it.
Ah well, at least Damon Lindelof gets to explore belief on a space opera scale pretty soon, even if it’s for DC and not Star Wars. Which reminds us, Lanterns streams on HBO Max August 16.