Disney canceled Star Wars film development after Paul King and Simon Farnaby spent time on a robot-led idea that never reached the point where Lucasfilm wanted it to feel like Star Wars. Farnaby said the team moved on after getting absorbed by the project, and the concept has since been reworked into something else entirely.
Simon Farnaby on the split
“So we got distracted by that for a while,” Farnaby said of the project. He added, “But we never really nailed it.” Those lines do the heavy lifting here: this was not a finished package slipping late in the process, but a concept that stayed in development long enough to pull two filmmakers away from other work before it collapsed.
Robot concept, Star Wars test
The idea centered on a robot and deliberately avoided established Star Wars characters. Farnaby said, “They were like, we really need it to be a Star Wars movie, which is probably why it didn’t get turned into a Star Wars movie!” That is the core contradiction in the project: the people shaping it were experienced, but the material apparently read too far from the franchise’s built-in identity to move forward.
That issue helps explain why the film was shelved instead of pushed toward production. Disney and Lucasfilm have kept only a narrow set of Star Wars projects in motion, and the theatrical slate has stalled beyond 2027, leaving very little room for a concept that could not clearly be made to fit the brand.
Wonka after Star Wars
In 2023, King and Farnaby shifted their energy to Wonka, which starred Timothée Chalamet and grossed roughly $634 million worldwide for Warner Bros. That box-office result is the cleanest evidence of where their creative momentum went after the Star Wars idea was dropped.
Three years ago, Kathleen Kennedy introduced projects from James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy at Star Wars Celebration, but only a handful of titles remain in motion across streaming and theatrical plans. Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter is scheduled for May 2027, and that date now reads like the outer edge of the current theatrical pipeline rather than the start of a crowded slate.
The practical takeaway is simple: the King-Farnaby project is gone, the concept has been repurposed outside Star Wars, and there is no new release attached to it. For Disney and Lucasfilm, the problem was not lack of talent; it was that the idea never became the kind of Star Wars movie the franchise would actually carry to theaters.
