After years of exile on planet Disney+, Lucasfilm’s plan to marshal “Star Wars” back to the big screen is about to take off. Just a few hours after “The Mandalorian & Grogu” landed a summer 2026 release date from Disney, another “Star Wars” film from director James Mangold is starting to take shape. And it’s re-enlisting too. Beau Willimon, one of Tony Gilroy’s writers on the “Rogue One” prequel series “Andor,” has been hired to co-write Mangold’s “Star Wars” movie, tentatively known as “Dawn Of The Jedi” (via THR).
A working title for now, “Dawn Of The Jedi,” was announced at the Star Wars Celebration in 2023 along with two other Lucasfilm movies, one from filmmaker and Lucasfilm Chief Creator Office Dave Filoni, the other from director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, which features Daisy Ridley’s Rey Skywalker.
Mangold’s film is expected to trace the origins of the Force and will be set 25,000 years before any of the timelines and narratives seen in any of the previous movies or shows, making it the earliest “Star Wars” film ever.
Willimon, a playwright and screenwriter, created Netflix’s political drama “House Of Cards” and was one of the key writers on Gilroy’s critically acclaimed “Andor” series starring Diego Luna as Cassian Andor. Willimon is credited with writing some of the critical turning point episodes on “Andor,” including “Narkina 5,” “Nobody’s Listening,” and the fan-favorite prison break episode, “One Way Out,” which also earned him an Emmy writing nomination. Before that, he wrote George Clooney’s political drama, “The Ides Of March,” starring Clooney and Ryan Gosling.
“When I first started talking to Kathy [Kennedy] about doing one of these pictures, what occurred to me was thinking about what kind of genre of movie within Star Wars I wanted to do,” Mangold said during Celebration last year. “And I thought about a biblical epic, like a Ten Commandments, about the dawning of the Force. Where did the Force come from, when did we discover it, when did we learn how to use it?”
No release date has been set for “Dawn Of The Jedi,” but it’s expected that Mangold will focus on it next after completing his upcoming Bob Dylan movie, “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet.
Lucasfilm’s next “Star Wars” film, the aforementioned ‘Mandalorian & Grogu’ is slated for May 22, 2026. While the company has another release date penciled in for December 18, 2026, expected to be saved for Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “New Jedi Order” (another working title), it’s unclear if that film will be ready to shoot in time for next year.
Mangold works pretty fast, but given his workload and the time frames ahead of him—he just started shooting the Dylan film, so it’s not expected to be finished until sometime next year—the earliest we see his ‘Jedi’ movie will likely be 2027.