Looks Like the Skywalker Horse Hasn’t Been Completely Beat to Death Yet

After spending years telling us The Rise of Skywalker was the end of the nine-film Skywalker Saga, Lucasfilm is reportedly getting ready to saddle the horse back up for another ride. Jon Watts has reportedly been tapped to direct the first movie in Simon Kinberg’s developing Star Wars trilogy, and this time the plan is apparently to continue the Skywalker Saga with what would essentially be Episode X.

Daisy Ridley’s Rey is also expected to appear in some capacity, although there’s no word yet on how large that role would be. Disney hasn’t officially greenlit the movie, and Lucasfilm declined to comment on Watts’ reported involvement, so there are still a few steps between this report and somebody yelling “action” on a Star Wars set.

The really interesting part is how much this has apparently changed since Kinberg’s trilogy was first reported in 2024. Lucasfilm pushed back then on reports that these movies would be Episodes X, XI and XII, with the project instead described as a new series involving new characters. Now we’re apparently right back in Skywalker country.

WATTS ISN’T THE PART THAT WORRIES ME

I like Jon Watts for this, and Spider-Man: No Way Home is the reason why. He directed all three of Tom Holland’s original MCU Spider-Man movies, but No Way Home was the one that showed me he could handle a massive tentpole movie with an almost ridiculous number of moving parts without losing control of it.

That movie had three Spider-Men, villains pulled from multiple franchises, almost two decades of history, enormous fan expectations and enough nostalgia to completely bury the actual story if Watts had let it. Instead, all of those returning characters served Peter Parker’s story rather than replacing it. For all the cameos, surprises and multiverse insanity, Tom Holland’s Peter remained the center of the movie. The ending worked because Watts understood that seeing Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield again was fun, but none of it mattered if Holland’s Peter didn’t have an emotional story worth following.

That’s exactly the kind of juggling act a new Star Wars trilogy is going to require. Watts has already proven he can walk into something loaded with history, beloved characters and expectations and still make an actual movie instead of a two-hour checklist for fans.

He also isn’t completely new to Star Wars. Watts co-created Skeleton Crew with Christopher Ford and directed episodes of the series, so he’s already spent some time playing around in that galaxy and dealing with the Lucasfilm machine. Watts getting Episode X isn’t what makes me nervous.

THEN THERE’S SIMON KINBERG

Simon Kinberg is where my confidence starts dropping quickly. He’s been involved with X-Men movies I genuinely like, including Deadpool, Logan, X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past, so his résumé certainly isn’t one giant disaster. Unfortunately, that résumé also includes X-Men: The Last Stand. More importantly, it includes Dark Phoenix, which Kinberg didn’t just produce. He wrote and directed that piece of shit.

I had absolutely no use for Dark Phoenix. The X-Men have one of the greatest stories Marvel Comics ever published sitting right there in The Dark Phoenix Saga, and somehow Hollywood managed to take two separate swings at adapting it without either one coming close to what made that story work in the first place. There was always zero chance Kinberg was going to fix what went wrong with Dark Phoenix after The Last Stand. Instead, Dark Phoenix just left me wondering why anyone thought revisiting the story was a good idea.

Now he’s writing the trilogy that could reopen the Skywalker Saga after Lucasfilm spent years telling everybody it was finished. That’s a pretty big ask to hand to someone whose last directing effort left me with very little confidence in his ability to handle one of these giant franchise stories. Maybe Watts can bring something out of the material that I’m not expecting. I just wish the name attached to the screenplay gave me the same confidence as the one attached to the director’s chair.

DIDN’T WE ALREADY FINISH THIS?

There’s also the larger question hanging over the whole thing: why are we making Episode X in the first place? I don’t have some hard rule that says the Skywalker story can never continue, and if somebody has a genuinely good reason to make another chapter, then make the movie.

What makes this strange is the way Disney and Lucasfilm sold The Rise of Skywalker. That wasn’t presented as simply the ninth Star Wars movie. It was sold as the conclusion of a story that started with the original film and stretched across three generations of the Skywalker family. Seven years later, we’re now talking about Episode X.

Rey returning makes sense. Whatever anyone thinks about the sequel trilogy, she was its central character and ended The Rise of Skywalker carrying the Skywalker name. Calling the next movie Episode X while pretending she vanished would be stranger than bringing her back.

If Lucasfilm is going to reopen something it spent years telling us was finished, there needs to be an actual reason for it beyond the fact that “Skywalker” still looks good on a poster. Otherwise, maybe that horse really was dead for a reason.