New details about 2023's Star Wars movie Rogue Squadron have been revealed by director Patty Jenkins, who says the movie is "doing something original with great influence from the games and the books". That's according to a new interview with IGN.
Rogue Squadron means one thing to a generation of Star Wars fans: video games about X-Wings and other Rebel spaceships blowing up the Empire on a variety of Star Wars planets.
"There's a lot of things being acknowledged and understood about the greatness of all of those things, but yes, it's an original story and I'm so psyched to do it," Jenkins added. The film will about a new generation of fighter pilots, taking big risks on their journey to becoming the galaxy's best. The movie has been confirmed to be set in a "future era" of the Star Wars universe, which sounds to us like it could go beyond the timeframe of 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.
The film's story is coming along, too, and Jenkins has almost finished a detailed treatment of Rogue Squadron's story with an as-yet-unnamed screenwriter.
"We're finishing the treatment basically, which is pretty big," Jenkins tells Collider. "So it ends up being like where you're fairly close to a well-along screenplay by the time I'm done with the treatment in my process. So yeah, we've been working on it for awhile. It's going great. I'm super excited about it. I'm super excited about the story."
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron will be released in theaters in time for Christmas 2023.
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What's in a name?
Rogue Squadron has a few different meanings to Star Wars fans. The games were about Luke Skywalker's group of X-Wing pilots, set in between the original trilogy movies for the most part. They were well-liked by critics, though it's hard to see how they could be drawn upon for an original movie, other than maybe the interplay between the pilots, or the choices of locations.
More relevant, perhaps, is the X-Wing series of books, which were set after Return of the Jedi and saw ace pilot Wedge Antilles creating a new iteration of Rogue Squadron. The first book, by author Michael A Stackpole, was indeed called Rogue Squadron. Those books are no longer canonical – so Jenkins is free to tell a different story.
Whatever this film turns out to be, then, expect a whole bunch of Star Wars space battles in Rogue Squadron when it finally gets here.
