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The existence of a new Star Wars movie has been reported by multiple outlets, and it's apparently set on the Sith planet of Exegol. The unnamed film could come to either Disney Plus or theater screens, and it's reportedly got both a writer and a director attached already.
THR was the first to break the news, explaining that JD Dillard, the director of acclaimed 2016 sci-fi picture Sleight, is down to make this new movie. Matt Owens, a writer who worked on the shows Luke Cage and Agents of Shield, is apparently scripting it. Deadline then published a report that mentioned the Exegol detail.
This hasn't been officially confirmed or announced by Lucasfilm, so keep that in mind. There's not much more to the story right now, other than it's apparently not associated with the Star Wars movie being produced by Marvel CCO Kevin Feige, or Rian Johnson's previously-announced new trilogy of movies.
As both outlets note, it's plausible that any new Star Wars movie could be considered for Disney Plus, given how massively successful The Mandalorian has been on the platform. The next Star Wars theatrical movie officially on the schedule is releasing on December 16, 2022. We don't know what that film is yet, or who's directing it.
Dillard sounds like a really interesting choice for a Star Wars movie. It's the Exegol detail here that deflates us a bit. The Sith planet was the weakest element of The Rise of Skywalker: it's where Palpatine was based with a faceless bunch of cultists, and he somehow managed to craft a whole fleet of star destroyers in secret that could each destroy a planet.
It was bad. The lack of explanation for anything happening on that planet was quite nicely dissected by Empire's Chris Hewitt earlier this week:
Perhaps this new movie could explain how Exegol came to be, and how the Final Order was created, to give Episode 9 additional context. But if The Mandalorian has shown us anything, it's surely that all of the best Star Wars stories are waiting to be told far away from anyone with the surnames 'Skywalker' or 'Palpatine'.