Deadpool & Wolverine producer contracted for a new Star Wars movie trilogy, but there’s a catch

Star Wars: Rebels co-creator Simon Kinberg has been contracted to write and develop a new Star Wars movie trilogy for Lucasfilm, The Hollywood Reporter revealed today. The news may stir mixed feelings for Star Wars fans. On one hand, Kinberg’s project sounds like exactly what the fandom has been asking for. Very little information was given about the new trilogy’s intention or direction, but THR’s sources say it’ll feature “brand new characters and a new story” rather than be a continuation of the Skywalker Saga, which has dominated the film side of the Star Wars franchise.

On the other hand, Kinberg’s name is just one more on the long, long list of established creators working on future Star Wars projects, most of which Lucasfilm has announced with significant fanfare, then rarely spoken of again.

Kinberg comes to the project with a lot of Star Wars experience — he’s credited as a writer on 74 episodes of Rebels — and a lot of experience with fandom-centric projects in general, though not always fan-favorite projects. He was a producer on Deadpool, Deadpool 2, and Deadpool & Wolverine, and on various X-Men movie and TV projects and spin-offs, including the TV series Legion and the movie Logan. He was a frequent writer on the decidedly mixed-bag run of recent X-Men movies, including X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (which he also directed). He also scripted the 2015 Fantastic Four.

But the biggest reason to be dubious about this announcement isn’t his bona fides; it’s the other work currently on his plate: He’s reportedly also developing a new Star Trek movie series with Paramount, and IMDB (admittedly not always accurate about upcoming projects) shows him as a producer on nine different projects currently in development, pre-production, or production, including the screen adaptations of Andy Weir’s novel Artemis (his follow-up to The Martian, which Kinberg also co-produced), Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne, and Stephen King’s The Running Man (directed by Shaun of the Dead’s Edgar Wright). That’s a lot of irons for anyone to have in the fire.

That speaks to Lucasfilm’s ongoing habit of tapping extremely busy creatives — Rian Johnson, Taika Waititi, Damon Lindelof, James Mangold, Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and more — to work on Star Wars projects which never come to fruition. So add this new theoretical trilogy to that roster, but take it with a grain of salt — which at this point should be the strategy whenever a new Star Wars project is announced. Until it actually has a trailer, a poster, a release date, or a “What it was supposed to be and why it got canceled” cover story, it’s one for the maybe-someday checklist, and not much else.