Director Damon Lindelof details brutal reason he was fired from his bold take on Star Wars film

The genius mind behind Lost and Watchmen, Damon Lindelof, was fired from a Star Wars project that he oddly described as a “protestant reformation” of the hit franchise.

Back in 2022, the World War Z writer was pegged as the lead mind for a new untitled Star Wars film. Few details were revealed about the project, but by 2023, he’d left the film.

“The writing was really hard. It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode IX. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of a tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit like this,” he said during a recent sitdown on the The Ringer’s House of R podcast.

Following the release of Episode VII, the general feeling was that “we were going to be launching” with new characters after the conclusion of Rey, Finn, and Poe’s story.

What actually happened was quite different.

Why was Damon Lindelof fired from Star Wars?

 

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Also in the podcast, Damon Lindelof addressed the “Bantha in the room” as he admitted that he was ultimately “fired” from the Star Wars project.

“I was fired off of a ‘Star Wars’ movie. 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,” he revealed.

As for the ditched ideas, Damon and his partners were looking to pay tribute to the conversations Stars Wars fans were already having.

He explained: “But what we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon and I, what we were attempting to do 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, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside ‘Star Wars,’ and it didn’t work.

“You have your cake and eat it too. The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”

I mean, now I kinda want more details.

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Featured image credit: MediaPunch/Shutterstock and Disney