Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson ‘will oversee the next Star Wars trilogy’

Rian Johnson is still set for his planned Star Wars trilogy, according to a reporter.

Author Sariah Wilson shared on Tuesday that during her recent Zoom interview with the director he assured her that he was still the man behind the new movies.

But Disney has yet to confirm that Rian, who directed 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is taking the lead. 

‘I’m just going to post this now because I can see that I’m going to get a lot of requests – Yes, Rian’s SW trilogy is still on,’ Wilson tweeted.

‘No dates or timelines because he has other projects going on, but it is happening. THAT IS ALL I KNOW ABOUT IT.’ 

The interview was done via Zoom and the writer, who works for USA Today, shared a photo from the chat. 

There was no mention of Johnson’s trilogy during Disney’s Investor Day event in December 2020.

He was announced as the director of the new trilogy in 2017 before The Last Jedi came out. But when that film had mixed reviews, he was believed to have been quietly let go. 

However, Johnson has always maintained that he was working on the new trilogy.

In 2017 he said he was on board for sure: ‘One story told over three movies. Go new places, meet new folks, come up with a new story to tell in the Star Wars universe. The sky’s the limit… and they really responded to that.’ 

In 2018, Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were supposed to work on the trilogy but then they dropped out. 

Johnson told The Observer in 2019 that he wants the new Star Wars films to not focus on the Skywalker family. ‘I think that the fun and challenging part of it is to dive in, figure out what’s exciting and then figure out what it’s going to be,’ Johnson said in the interview. 

‘We’re doing something that steps beyond the legacy characters. What does that look like? To me, the blue sky element of it is what was most striking about it. I know the way that I’m coming at it, and what’s fun about it for everyone in George Lucas’ films, is figuring out, “What’s the next step?” It really makes you think and figure out what the essence of Star Wars is for me and what that will look like moving forward.’    

More recently, Johnson revealed he’d be ‘thrilled’ to work more in the space saga’s big screen universe. He told BANG Showbiz: ‘We’ll see! I’m still talking to Lucasfilm, they’re figuring out what they’re doing. We’ll see what happens. I’d be thrilled if it happens! I’m working on my own stuff too.’

Johnson was blamed for making The Last Jedi too different.

And he said after the movie came out he wished he had more input from fans: ‘[Test screening] is really nice and that’s something on Star Wars… you can’t test ‘Star Wars’ movies for a lot of different reasons.

‘I’ve always hated test screenings, and when we were making Star Wars, at a certain point in the process you’re like, ‘God, I would give my left arm to put this in front of 300 people in Burbank and just see how it plays.’