Kathy Kennedy says Lucasfilm has been working on a Rey film “for a few years” and a script should be ready in around six weeks

There’s no official release time frame for the three new Star Wars movies that were announced at Celebration, but there are indications that the Rey-centered film about the new Jedi Order might be closest to being ready.

“We’ve been working on that [film] for a few years and all of that feeds in to our overall storytelling,” Lucasfilm President Kathy Kennedy told Yahoo at Celebration recently. Those years of work have led to the announcement with Daisy Ridley, but it’s actually close to having a script too.

“So we’ve just got to a point now where we’ve got a wonderful writer in Steven Knight, he’s come on board and we’re going to see a script probably in the next month and a half that we’ve been working on for quite a while,” Kennedy said. “So we’re getting close.”

That’s pretty far along, especially for having just been announced, and though it doesn’t by any means suggest the script will be ready to shoot in just six weeks, it does mean there will be a draft finished pretty soon. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is directing the project, an Steven Knight is writing the script. This all suggests that work on the movie is further along than we thought, and with the next Star Wars release slot currently slated for December 2025, it would seem like this one is in a prime spot to lead the way into this new era of theatrical releases from the galaxy far, far away.

The movie, starring Ridley’s return as the fan favorite Rey Skywalker, will be set 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker and will see Rey rebuilding the Jedi Order. The fact that they’ve been working on this project for a while makes sense, and it’s cool to get to the point where they were ready to publicly announce it. “It was a pretty straightforward phone call,” Kennedy told Variety about bringing Ridley to Celebration for that announcement. “I started out by just saying, ‘Hey, I think we’re getting near being ready.’ We’ve been talking a lot about what we’re doing in the movie space and I said, ‘I think we’re getting close to being ready. How would you like to go to Celebration?’ That was really the beginning of it. She was out of her mind excited.”

It’s safe to say that Star Wars fans are too.