Rey's Next Chapter Just Vanished From the 2026 Release Calendar

1 day ago by Kael Voss 5 min read

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Disney quietly pulled the untitled Rey movie — believed to be Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's New Jedi Order — off its December 18, 2026 release date, with no replacement slot announced. It's the latest stumble for a film that's cycled through three writing teams in eighteen months, and it says a lot about where Rey Skywalker actually sits in Dave Filoni's Lucasfilm right now.

Somewhere between the Ahsoka Season 2 teaser and the Starfighter reveal at D23, a much quieter piece of news slipped out: the Rey movie's December 18, 2026 release date is gone. Ice Age 6 has the slot now. No new date has replaced it.

Nobody at Lucasfilm has said the word "cancelled" — and to be clear, they shouldn't, because by all reporting this isn't that. But when a tentpole film gets removed from the calendar without a landing spot, "on hold" starts doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence.

A Troubled Production, Even Before This

This is the project widely believed to be Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's New Jedi Order, set roughly fifteen years after The Rise of Skywalker, following Rey as she tries to rebuild the Jedi Order from scratch. Daisy Ridley signed back on. Obaid-Chinoy, an Oscar-winning documentarian making her narrative blockbuster debut, signed on to direct. On paper, that's an exciting swing — someone with a very different sensibility than the Filoni/Kennedy house style getting a shot at the next chapter of the Skywalker line.

In practice, the writers' room has been a revolving door. Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson wrote an early draft and exited. Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight came on to rework the script — and then left too, reportedly around October. That's two full writing regimes gone before a single frame has rolled, on a movie that was, until this week, still nominally eighteen weeks from theaters. Removing it from the release calendar isn't really a plot twist at this point. It's the studio finally admitting the schedule everyone already knew was fiction.

Why This, Why Now

The official framing — per recent reporting — is that the Rey film is "on hold" while Star Wars: Starfighter and James Mangold's still-untitled New Republic-era project move through production first. That's a defensible sequencing call on its own. But stack it next to what Dave Filoni told the press at D23 about The Hunt for Ben Solo — "the Force is not with us in that regard" — and a pattern starts to form: legacy Skywalker-family storytelling is currently losing the scheduling fight to films that aren't tethered to the Skywalker saga at all. Starfighter is a brand-new corner of the galaxy with Ryan Gosling's Kade Auberon. Mangold's film reportedly reaches even further back, into the earliest days of the Jedi. Rey's story, the one direct sequel to the Skywalker saga currently in the pipeline, keeps getting bumped.

I don't think that's an accident, and I don't think it's malicious either. It's a studio being run, for the first time since the Disney acquisition, by someone who cut his teeth on The Clone Wars and genuinely believes the galaxy is bigger than nine movies about one family. Filoni's instincts have been right often enough — Andor, Rebels, the current Ahsoka trajectory toward Dathomir — that I'm inclined to trust the sequencing logic here over the doom-posting. But there's a real cost to indefinitely parking the one film that was supposed to answer "what happens after Rey Skywalker?" It's been going on six years since Exegol, and the sequel trilogy's most direct continuation keeps sliding further out of view.

The Fans Who Actually Wanted This

Here's what makes this sting more than a routine release-date shuffle: unlike the endless "bring back the Skywalker twins" fantasy-casting threads, New Jedi Order was a real commitment. Ridley attached. A genuinely interesting director attached. An actual title on an actual calendar. For sequel-trilogy defenders — and I know Discord arguments make it sound like there are none left, but there are plenty of us — this was supposed to be proof that Lucasfilm still believed in where Rise of Skywalker left things. Watching it quietly vanish from the schedule the same week Filoni closes the door on Ben Solo makes it hard not to read the sequel era as, at minimum, deprioritized.

That's not the same as abandoned. Screen Rant and several other outlets pushing back hard on "cancelled" framing this week are right that nothing has actually died here. Development delays on massive blockbusters — especially ones that burn through writers this fast — are common, not fatal. Rogue One survived reshoots that basically remade its third act. Solo survived replacing its directors mid-shoot and still came out a fine movie, just a financially unlucky one. A movie losing a release date eighteen months into a bumpy writers' room is not automatically a corpse.

Where That Leaves Rey

If you're grading Filoni's opening stretch as Lucasfilm's president purely on new mythology — Dathomir in live-action, a starfighter pilot with no Jedi baggage, a New Republic-era Mandalorian conclusion — it's been a genuinely strong run. If you're grading it on finishing what the sequel trilogy started, the ledger looks thinner: Ben Solo stays dead, and now Rey's next chapter doesn't even have a release window. Both things can be true. The galaxy is expanding in exciting directions and the Skywalker saga's most direct continuation is currently stuck in neutral.

I'd bet on New Jedi Order eventually landing, probably once Starfighter and Mangold's film clear the pipeline in 2027 and 2028. But "eventually" isn't a release date, and after eighteen months of writer turnover, Rey Skywalker deserves better than "we'll get to it." May the Force be with her — whenever Lucasfilm finds the time.