Rey's Movie Might Not Be Dead After All — Here's the Actual Update

7 hours ago by Kael Voss 4 min read

---

Two weeks after Rey's New Jedi Order movie quietly vanished from Disney's release calendar, a fresh Production Weekly listing has both that film and Dave Filoni's own untitled MandoVerse-culmination project showing up in active pre-production tracking. Take it as a genuine sign of life — but not, yet, as a greenlight.

Back on August 23, I wrote about Rey's next chapter disappearing from Disney's December 18 release slot with no replacement date, and framed it against Dave Filoni closing the door on The Hunt for Ben Solo the same week — a pattern that read like the sequel era quietly losing the scheduling fight to newer corners of the galaxy. Two weeks later, the story has a wrinkle worth updating you on.

What Actually Changed

The latest issue of Production Weekly — the trade publication that tracks film and TV productions moving through pre-production, casting, and location scouting — lists both New Jedi Order and Filoni's own untitled feature as active in its pipeline. That's genuinely different information than we had two weeks ago, when all anyone could confirm was a missing release date and a production history full of writer turnover.

Here's what each project actually is, since it's easy to conflate them: New Jedi Order is Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's Rey-focused film, set roughly fifteen years after The Rise of Skywalker, following Daisy Ridley's Rey as she tries to build a new Jedi Order from scratch. Filoni's untitled project is a different film entirely — originally conceived as a cinematic culmination of the MandoVerse threads running through The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka. Both have been circling development for years. Both, per this listing, are now showing real movement.

Why I'm Not Popping Champagne Yet

Production Weekly is a legitimately useful industry resource, and multiple outlets reporting on this — ScreenRant, Jedi News, ComicBook.com — all include the same caveat, so I'll pass it along without softening it: appearing in a trade tracking registry is not a greenlight. It's not a start-of-filming announcement. It's not even confirmation from Lucasfilm or Disney. It means people whose job is to track industry production movement have picked up signals that these projects are circulating through pre-production channels — location scouting inquiries, department head hiring, that kind of paperwork trail. That's a real signal. It's also exactly the kind of signal that's burned Star Wars fans before, on this specific project. New Jedi Order has already cycled through two writing regimes — Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson, then Steven Knight, who left in October — before this week's news. "Active in pre-production tracking" and "definitely happening on schedule" are not the same sentence.

Reading the Tea Leaves Anyway

That said, there's a reason to take this more seriously than the usual rumor mill churn. Starfighter has already wrapped principal photography and is locked for a May 2027 release, and Filoni's own next directing chair is Ahsoka Season 2 — meaning the theatrical slate behind those two is genuinely due to fill in next. Two long-gestating projects showing up together in the same Production Weekly tracking cycle fits that gap far better than random chatter would. It's not the only project still circling Lucasfilm's docket — Mangold's Dawn of the Jedi has reportedly been sitting on hold since earlier this year — but it does mean Rey's story and Filoni's own MandoVerse send-off currently have the freshest paper trail of anything left on the board.

It also lines up with something I underestimated two weeks ago: Filoni closing the door on Ben Solo wasn't necessarily a sign he's deprioritizing sequel-era stories generally — it was specifically a no to reviving a dead character. Rey isn't dead. Din Djarin and Grogu aren't dead. Stories that continue forward from where the Skywalker saga and the MandoVerse actually left off are, on this evidence, very much still on his desk.

Where That Leaves Us

I called New Jedi Order "on hold, not abandoned" two weeks ago, and this update doesn't change that framing so much as confirm the "not abandoned" half a little more concretely. Nothing here gives us a release date, a director confirmation beyond what we already knew, or a start-of-principal-photography announcement. What it gives us is a second, independent signal — beyond just "the studio hasn't officially cancelled it" — that both of these long-delayed projects are actually moving through the machinery that precedes production, not sitting untouched in a drawer somewhere on the Lucasfilm campus.

I'll believe it fully when Lucasfilm confirms it themselves, the way they did for Starfighter and the New Republic film at D23. Until then, this is worth filing as cautiously encouraging rather than confirmed — exactly the kind of update that deserves a follow-up, not a victory lap. May the Force be with the production trackers keeping tabs on this one, because right now they know more than the rest of us.