Ranking All 22 Star Wars Movies Disney And Lucasfilm Have Cancelled

It is an almost regular occurrence now that a new Star Wars film is announced and then subsequently cancelled three years later after no new information. First under Kathleen Kennedy, and now under Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, Disney and Lucasfilm have openly struggled to produce any sort of follow-up to 2019’s much-maligned Rise of Skywalker. The Mandalorian & Grogu, a finale to a three-year-old TV show that was clearly supposed to be a Disney Plus release, was the first theatrical movie since the Skywalker Saga ended. With mixed reviews and a barely break-even box office, it’s clear things are not going well in a galaxy far, far away.

In light of yet another Star Wars project being cancelled today, here’s a roundup and ranking of every cancelled Star Wars movie in order of how much potential I think the idea had. Each film here at least entered pre-production to some degree, so I’m not counting rejected pitches that never got off the ground, such as David Fincher’s untitled film and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. I’m also not counting films that got cancelled and reworked into Disney Plus shows by the same people, such as the Kenobi film being retooled into the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series. Additionally, I left off a few films, like Taika Waititi’s untitled film, that Lucasfilm has recently insisted are still happening (even if it’s not likely they’ll ever see the light of day).

15. Josh Trank’s Boba Fett Film

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker on this list, Josh Trank will likely never be able to escape the stink of his biggest failure – 2015’s Fant4stic (Fantastic Four, for the layman). After the disastrous movie’s critical and commercial failure, and several substantiated rumors about his behavior on set, Trank has been all but blacklisted by major studios. Simon Kinberg, writer of many X-Men movies and The Martian, was slated to write the film but departed the project. In 2020, Trank directed a Tom Hardy movie, Capone, which released straight to VOD due to COVID. The film received negative reviews, and Vertical Entertainment reported it as a VOD failure. Despite the fact that The Book of Boba Fett was largely rejected by fans, I think it’s very likely whatever Trank would have produced would have been far worse.

14. The New Jedi Order Rey Movie

While the character had a lot of potential when we met her in The Force Awakens, I think it’s fair to say that audiences have not become attached to Rey as a character the same way they have for Luke and Leia, or even Anakin in the prequels. In fact, she seems to be a lot less popular than her fellow Sequel trilogy characters Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren. I want to also firmly say this is no fault of Daisy Ridley’s – she was tossed back and forth between warring writers across the trilogy determined to undo each other’s work, and it was impossible for a real character to develop. While multiple Oscar and Emmy-award-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy would likely have made a more than competent film, Rey just doesn’t have the heat to lead a theatrical film. And is a spin-off film following the main character of the previous movie even a spin-off? Damon Lindelof, Justin Britt-Gibson, and Steven Knight have all been attached to write at some point and departed the project shortly afterward. This one is dead in the water.

13. Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron

Patty Jenkins overall has a solid track record – she directed both Monster, the pretty good drama about real serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and the first Wonder Woman movie, which I felt was solid. She did, however, also write and direct Wonder Woman 1984, which is quite possibly the worst movie in the DCEU, or at least very close to the bottom. In fact, it is one of the worst big-budget movies I’ve ever seen. On top of being misguided, miscast, full of unfinished effects, and confusingly bad, the story was offensive and disturbing in treating sexual assault as a running gag. Thankfully, audiences did not respond well to this, and her Star Wars project sputtered and died following the theatrical failure of Solo. I do not believe her movie establishing the new generation of starfighters would have been worth it.

12. David Benioff and D.B Weiss’s The First Jedi Trilogy

I’m actually pretty mixed on how this might have gone. It’s a pretty open secret at this point that Weiss and Benioff rushed through finishing Game of Thrones to disastrous results so they could get working on their new Star Wars trilogy. The last season of the HBO show was so catastrophically bad that the dynamic duo lost all their Hollywood weight, and their trilogy that was partially responsible for ruining the biggest show in the world never came to be. Disney quietly parted ways with the pair and cancelled the movie in 2019 after Thrones ended. The thing is, Weiss and Benioff are not total hacks – the first six seasons of Game of Thrones, where they were adapting George R.R. Martin’s work rather than writing an original story, contain some of the best seasons of TV ever made. Additionally, their new show 3 Body Problem with Netflix, an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s famous novel, has been very well received. I think they have the chops to adapt stories, but not create them. If adapting EU novels, this could have worked – but we’ll never know, and that’s probably still for the best.

11. Kevin Feige’s Untitled Film

We don’t know much about this film, other than that Feige pitched the idea to Kennedy and she gave him the green light to put a script together. Feige pulled in Rick and Morty writer and Loki creator Michael Waldron to pen the script. Feige was in touch with his old collaborators, The Russo Brothers, to direct, but they declined for scheduling reasons. Feige’s script is rumored to be popular at Lucasfilm, with some there calling it the best Star Wars script they’d ever seen, and likely had a comedic bent considering the writer, but it just never went anywhere. Like most of the movies on this list, after the box office flop of Solo, this movie was quietly shelved. At this point we don’t know enough to judge it, but I can’t imagine it being as amazing as was rumored if it never made it past the writing stage.

10. Knights of the Old Republic Film

It would probably be generous to call the track of writer Laeta Kalogridis mixed. While she did write the excellent Scorsese/DiCaprio movie Shutter Island, co-wrote James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel (a movie I know is not popular but I enjoyed greatly), and created the popular TV series Altered Carbon, she’s also responsible for writing a huge string of flops including Alexander, Terminator Genisys, The House With A Clock In Its Walls, and Another Simple Favor. While it’s possible she might have penned a good adaptation of the celebrated RPG’s legendary story, this film never came to fruition. She reported she had a finished script in 2019, but after The Rise of Skywalker, the project died. Again, likely for the best.

9. Donald Glover’s Lando Standalone Film

I love Donald Glover – he’s gone from America’s lovable dork in Community to an accomplished filmmaker with Atlanta to a globally famous rapper as Childish Gambino. In Solo, he was one of the highlights of the film, and came out of it looking pretty good despite the movie being just okay at best. The man can do no wrong! But I think a Lando film is completely misguided in the first place. The character works great in both the original trilogy and Solo because he has limited time on screen – he’s about one thing, and that’s making money. I would suggest having him run a heist crew, but we basically already saw that in Solo. While it’d probably be a fun time, I don’t see it resonating with audiences. Promoting side characters to major ones has, with few exceptions, not panned out well for Star Wars.

8. Simon Kinberg’s Sequel Sequel Trilogy

Kinberg has a varied selection of films under his belt, including writing Mr. and Mrs. Smith and several of the more mediocre X-Men movies. He’s also directly produced The Martian, Sherlock Holmes, Cinderella, Chappie, and a wealth of other movies over the last 25 years. Notably, he also produced Star Wars Rebels alongside new Lucasfilm boss Dave Filoni. Kinberg’s trilogy was meant to be Episodes 10-12, following the sequel trilogy chronologically, but rumors are that the project stalled out as Lucasfilm battled internally about whether to have the new trilogy continue the Skywalker Saga or start fresh with only new characters. Frankly, Kinberg doesn’t seem to have the writing chops necessary for this, but he seems like a producer who can get things done with the right creatives on board. The project stalled out in 2024, and no work has been done, so it’s unlikely this one will come to fruition either.

7. Rian Johnson’s Trilogy

The Last Jedi is one of the best movies in the franchise, and I’ve never understood the hatred it seemed to fester online. The problems in the sequel trilogy all basically stem from the fact that J.J. Abrams had no plans on how the story would continue past The Force Awakens, and left it to Disney to hire whoever they wanted to follow him. They did, and Rian Johnson’s movie works very well as a standalone film, but it is very obviously fighting the story from The Force Awakens the whole time. Then, infamously, J.J. Abrams returned for The Rise of Skywalker to spend two and a half hours to stomp all over The Last Jedi like an angry child. My real wish is that the entire sequel trilogy had been made by Johnson from the start. I think having his own new trilogy would result in some excellent movies, but between the amazing murder mysteries he’s created in the Knives Out series and Poker Face, history went the right way. I don’t think Star Wars “fans” would have ever accepted Johnson’s movies anyway, so mystery fans can continue to eat good; everything worked out for the best.

6. A Droid Story Animated Film

This animated feature was set to be a Disney Plus movie, showing R2D2 and C-3PO meeting a new hero and guiding them on the path to greatness. Like all great side characters, the bickering married couple is best enjoyed in small doses, so I’m not sure how this would have actually played out putting them front and center. Since we know nothing else about it since it stalled out in 2021, and no talent was ever attached, we’ll just have to wonder what it could have been.

5. J.D. Dillard’s Exegol Film

This is a weird one, and it probably could have been something special if Star Wars was a franchise that actually let creatives make decisions. For those not familiar with Dillard, he directed the low-budget successful horror films Sleight and Sweetheart, as well as the critically acclaimed but box office bomb Devotion. This horror film in the Star Wars universe would have been penned by Luke Cage writer Matt Owens and taken place on Exegol, which you may remember as “The Dark Souls planet” from Rise of Skywalker. It’s unlikely this project ever resulted in a full script, and Dillard moved on in 2022 when the film was cancelled to direct episodes of several horror TV Shows. He’s now working on a promising adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel credited with creating the cyberpunk genre, for Apple TV. A horror Star Wars movie would be cool but would likely be capped at PG-13 by Disney, so again I think things worked out for the best.

4. Stephen Soderbergh’s The Hunt for Ben Solo

This is a weird one, because there are very strong arguments for and against it. We all watched Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren, die at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, and this film was intended to take place after that one. So a major problem already is that Ben Solo is dead. However, as we have learned, in the world of Star Wars people can just “somehow” return from the dead off-screen, so what do I know. It’s true that Kylo Ren was done dirty in the sequel trilogy, as well as all the characters, but Adam Driver’s incredible performance was essentially the glue that held the whole thing together. Soderbergh and Driver met with Lucasfilm, who loved the pitch, in 2025. However, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Entertainment Chair Alan Bergman shot down the pitch immediately. According to Driver, they simply were not interested in a story about Kylo Ren still being alive out of principle. Kennedy announced the film had been shelved in January 2026. With Soderbergh at the helm (Oceans Eleven, Magic Mike, Logan Lucky), this might have worked, but as Kylo himself once said, “Let the past die. Kill it if you must.” Driver is on to better things now.

3. Paul King and Simon Farnaby’s Droid Comedy

The movie that inspired this list, the Paddington and Wonka writing/directing duo revealed this week that they had been hired to write a comedy film based in the Star Wars universe. This movie would follow a new droid character and feature zero existing Star Wars characters, which, if you ask me, would have been very refreshing. After developing out the story for Lucasfilm, the pitch was rejected again by Disney. They were told that the movie they created was not a good fit for Disney, whatever that means, and were encouraged to redevelop the script to be a non-Star Wars movie and take it to another studio. Both Paddington and Wonka were comfortable comedic family films, and producing something like that for Star Wars could have been great. At this point, when Bob Iger says something isn’t a good fit for Disney, my first thought is that the real meaning is that Disney wouldn’t have the level of creative control they are used to.

2. James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi

While certainly still positive overall, James Mangold has a fairly mixed track record. He’s written and directed massive high-quality hits like Logan, A Complete Unknown, and Ford v Ferrari, even grabbing Oscar nominations for each of those films. He also wrote the 1988 film Oliver & Company, a personal Disney favorite of mine. However, he also made several flops such as Knight and Day, The Wolverine, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. At the very least, Mangold has shown he’s able to put together a competent film consistently, so I’m still interested in what this would have been. This movie was described as a Biblical epic, set far in ancient times before the word Jedi even existed. With Andor creator Beau Willimon on board, this could have been the smash hit writing-directing duo Star Wars desperately needs. Sadly, Kennedy announced in January 2026 that this project, along with Lando and The Hunt for Ben Solo, was not moving forward.

1. Guillermo del Toro’s Jabba the Hutt

In 2018, writer David S. Goyer (Blade trilogy, The Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel) was hired by Lucasfilm to write a script for a film titled Jabba the Hutt, intended to be directed by the one and only Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Frankenstein, Pan’s Labyrinth). Alden Ehrenreich would have returned to play Han Solo in this film, set soon after the events of Solo, largely around Mos Eisley. In a 2023 interview where he confirmed both the film’s existence and cancellation, del Toro said, “We had the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt, so I was super happy. We were doing a lot of stuff, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money, and then it’s one of those 30 screenplays that goes away.” Del Toro’s style and Goyer’s writing talent could have produced something very cool here, but ultimately, as he said, it’s likely this would have been a “Star Wars” movie and not a “del Toro movie.”

Which movie out of these do you wish got made? Let us know in the comments below!