Taika Waititi’s long-developing Star Wars movie has finally received an update clear enough to survive hyperspace translation: it is “very iced.” The director told Inverse that the project he has been developing for Lucasfilm is being put on hold while he and screenwriter Tony McNamara work on something different together.
That is the confirmed part. The movie has not been given a title, plot, cast or release date, and Lucasfilm has not announced a replacement version of the same project. Waititi also stopped short of declaring it permanently dead. His own escape-hatch line was that ice ages eventually end. For now, however, a Star Wars film first announced in 2020 is no longer the project he and McNamara are actively pursuing.
A six-year development story finally gets a plain answer
Lucasfilm announced the film on May 4, 2020, naming Waititi as director and co-writer alongside Krysty Wilson-Cairns, whose credits include 1917 and Last Night in Soho. The announcement did not include a release date, but it presented the movie as a new theatrical chapter from a filmmaker who already had a foothold in the galaxy.
Waititi directed the first-season finale of The Mandalorian and voiced IG-11, the bounty-hunter droid who discovered that protecting a tiny green child was apparently a valid route to a personality upgrade. His combination of comedy, emotion and large-scale adventure made him an understandable choice for a standalone movie. Years passed, though, without the usual signs of a production moving toward cameras.
More recently, McNamara, the Oscar-nominated writer of The Favourite and Poor Things, became involved with the screenplay. Waititi’s new comments came while promoting Klara and the Sun. Inverse reports that he said the pair would put the Star Wars movie on ice and work on a different project instead. When he asked his publicist whether he could reveal more, the answer was no.
“On ice” is not the same as officially canceled
The careful wording matters. Waititi publicly described a pause and a shift in attention, not a formal cancellation notice from Lucasfilm. His comment that an ice age can end leaves open the theoretical possibility that the idea could return. There is no confirmed timetable for that return, and there is no reason to treat the line as a secret promise.
In practical terms, the movie is not moving forward with its latest creative team right now. That is more definite than the vague “still in development” language that can keep a franchise project hovering for years. It also prevents every unrelated Waititi interview from becoming another round of reading Jedi tea leaves.
The newly mentioned replacement project is equally mysterious. Waititi confirmed that he and McNamara are working on something else, but neither a title nor a studio, genre or production schedule was disclosed. Any attempt to connect it to another franchise would be speculation. The only solid conclusion is that their collaboration continues outside this particular Star Wars film.
The lost movie was supposed to recover some original-trilogy fun
Earlier in 2026, Waititi described the tone he had been seeking. He wanted to reconnect with the fun he remembered in the original films while still allowing for serious stakes. He also said his story needed space away from the many other characters and plotlines already moving through the franchise.
That direction made sense for him. Thor: Ragnarok showed how comfortably Waititi could loosen a giant franchise without abandoning its emotional stakes, while Jojo Rabbit demonstrated how his comic instincts can sit beside much darker material. A self-contained corner of Star Wars might have offered room for eccentric characters without requiring the movie to repair, extend or explain every branch of the timeline.
But an appealing creative intention is not the same thing as a film ready to shoot. No synopsis was released, and audiences never saw enough to judge what Waititi’s version actually was. The honest object of nostalgia here is a possibility, not a lost finished movie hidden in a Lucasfilm vault.
For Star Wars, a definite pause is useful information
Major franchise development creates a long trail of announced writers, directors and concepts, not all of which become movies. That is not unique to Star Wars, but the galaxy’s enormous audience makes every dormant project feel like an unresolved transmission.
Waititi’s answer closes one of those loops, at least for the present. His movie was real enough to be officially announced and developed across several years. It is now paused while its latest collaborators make something else. There may be a little hope in “ice ages do come to an end,” but hope is not a production schedule.
The more intriguing immediate question has moved beyond lightsabers: what idea convinced Waititi and McNamara to leave this galaxy behind and build together somewhere else?
Sources: Inverse’s interview with Taika Waititi, published October 19, 2026; Lucasfilm’s original film announcement, May 4, 2020; Variety’s October 19 report.
Featured image: Taika Waititi at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, photographed by CaseyJNewell for WikiPortraits. Used unchanged under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
