Jon Watts Star Wars Backlash: 25 Years of the Same Insane Outrage

If you heard that Jon Watts is directing the next Star Wars movie, there's a good chance you heard it from a guy on X who was very upset about it. He probably had a lightsaber in his banner. His pinned post was probably about Kathleen Kennedy, who hasn't run Lucasfilm since January.

That about sums up the week.

For anyone who missed it, Watts is attached to direct the first film in a new Star Wars trilogy that Simon Kinberg is writing, meant as the next chapter of the Skywalker Saga. Rey is expected to appear in some form, and a standalone Rey film has been put on hold so Episode X can go first.

Nobody has read a script. Disney hasn't officially greenlit the project yet, though it appears to be the furthest along after Starfighter. There's no title and no release date. The internet has reached a verdict anyway, and the verdict is that Star Wars is over. I've been keeping count since 1999 and I think we're somewhere in the high double digits.

I want to go through what people are actually saying, because the complaints fall apart pretty quickly once you read them closely, and it's more fun to watch that happen slowly.

The Jon Watts Skeleton Crew résumé nobody read

The most common reaction is some version of "who?" A surprising number of people seem to think Lucasfilm pulled a random name out of the Marvel parking lot. One reply I saw was just the two names followed by "Brother....." as if the names were the whole argument.

Here's who. Watts took over Spider-Man after Sony had already rebooted the character twice and mostly worn out the audience's patience. His trilogy grossed more than $3.9 billion worldwide from 2017 to 2021. No Way Home brought back two earlier Spider-Men and a pile of old villains and somehow didn't turn into a clip show, which is harder than it sounds. Ask the Flash movie. If your next Star Wars trilogy has to carry forty years of history and still introduce new people, the guy who pulled that off with Spider-Man is a pretty logical phone call.

He isn't new to the galaxy, either. Watts co-created Skeleton Crew with Christopher Ford, directed its first and last episodes, and received a Children's and Family Emmy for his work on the series. I liked that show a lot. The kids talked like actual kids, Jude Law was clearly having the time of his life, and the whole thing felt like a VHS tape you'd rent from the grocery store in 1986. The Hollywood Reporter called it well-regarded but not widely seen, and I think that second half explains a lot about this week. Anybody who watched Skeleton Crew knows who Jon Watts is. If you're asking, you probably skipped the most recent Star Wars show this man made, which makes you a strange choice of judge for whether he should make Star Wars.

The Simon Kinberg Star Wars history people forgot

The second complaint is about Kinberg, and it's usually two words: "Dark Phoenix." Fair hit. Dark Phoenix was bad and I doubt Kinberg would argue. He also co-created the animated series Star Wars Rebels, which a lot of these same people treat as scripture. You can't point to the Rebels era as proof that Lucasfilm used to know what it was doing and then act like one of the people who built it is some stranger off the street. Writers have bad movies. Lawrence Kasdan co-wrote Empire and also co-wrote Solo, and I'm fairly sure the Dark Phoenix crowd didn't love Solo either.

Since honesty is supposed to be my whole deal, Watts has a miss on his record too. Wolfs, his Clooney and Pitt movie for Apple, was a high-profile misfire. So he's made a film that didn't land. Every director alive has done that. George Lucas produced Howard the Duck.

It's also worth remembering where this project has been. Lucasfilm originally announced Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy would direct a film following Rey, but progress was slow and it was eventually canceled. Star Wars has a long habit of chewing through directors. Solo lost its original pair in the middle of production, and Colin Trevorrow was off Episode IX before cameras rolled. THR described Watts as a reliable choice for a franchise that has famously struggled with directors. After ten years of chaos behind the camera, you'd think "reliable" would be the one thing everybody could agree on.

While we are here, some FAQs that I've seen going around that I'd like to give a clear answer to:

Who is directing Star Wars Episode X?

Jon Watts, director of the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy and co-creator of Skeleton Crew, is attached to direct the first film in a new Skywalker Saga trilogy.

Who is writing the new Star Wars trilogy?

Simon Kinberg, co-creator of Star Wars Rebels.

Is Rey in the new Star Wars trilogy?

Daisy Ridley is expected to appear as Rey in some capacity. Her standalone film is on hold.

Has the movie been greenlit?

Not yet. Reports say Disney hasn't officially greenlit it.

The Star Wars fan backlash over a retcon that was never coming

Now for the complaint I find kind of sad. A lot of the anger this week comes from people who were sure Disney was going to retcon the sequels. You could see it in the Deadline comments, where one reader said they'd been hoping Lucasfilm would wise up and decanonize the sequel trilogy. That hope came from somewhere. For years, a certain slice of YouTube made a living telling its audience the sequels were about to be erased. REY IS GONE. SOURCES CONFIRM. The sources were usually a guy who knew a guy.

It was never going to happen. Those movies made an enormous amount of money, and Disney doesn't set money on fire because the comment section is cranky. The people making those videos understood that, and I'd bet my Black Series shelf on it. They also understood that the rumor kept people watching, and watching is how they get paid.

So the reporting now says the next trilogy continues the Skywalker Saga with Rey in it, and the audience that bought the retcon story feels lied to. They were lied to. The person who did it was the guy with the thumbnails. Jon Watts just happened to be standing closest when they turned around, and he's going to eat a month of angry videos for something he had nothing to do with.

There's a gentler complaint going around too, and it's the one I have the most patience for. Plenty of people are tired of the Skywalkers. One reply joked that the family never gets a day off, which made me laugh. Another pointed out that the Palpatines seem to have outlasted them. I get it. I'd love a Star Wars movie that has nothing to do with anybody's grandfather.

Why the Jon Watts Star Wars outrage keeps happening.

Still, "I hope they branch out" and "it's ruined" are very different statements, and only one of them can be said honestly about a movie that doesn't exist yet. From what's been reported, the new trilogy may focus on new characters, with Ridley in a much smaller role to start, which would make it less Skywalker-heavy than it sounds. That could turn out to be the branching out people are asking for, under a familiar banner. We won't know for years, which is kind of my point.

Meet the Star Wars tourists

I've started calling the loudest of these folks Star Wars tourists. By that I mean something specific. A tourist only shows up when there's something to be angry about. They snap a few pictures, sell the pictures, and go home until the next thing. Casual fans are a different group entirely, and I'm glad they exist, since they're how these movies make a billion dollars. Tourists don't watch the shows. They watch the reaction to the shows.

Stick around long enough and you can map their route.

It started with George Lucas. After The Phantom Menace, the man who invented Star Wars got treated like he'd keyed everyone's car in the parking lot. People made whole documentaries about how much they hated him, and he said in interviews that the abuse was part of why he'd lost interest in making more. Then in 2012 he sold the company, and it was like somebody flipped a switch. Overnight George was a misunderstood genius and the prequels were suddenly full of vision.

The anger needed a new address, and it found one in Kathleen Kennedy's office. For about a decade she was the villain of every video with a red arrow on the thumbnail. It didn't matter that she brought in J.J. Abrams for The Force Awakens, which grossed $2 billion, or that The Mandalorian and Andor became Disney+ hits during her tenure. Abrams and Rian Johnson took their share of the heat as well. And the fix, we were told over and over, was simple. Get rid of Kennedy and put Dave Filoni in charge. Filoni learned from Lucas. Filoni gets it.

The Dave Filoni Lucasfilm era got the same treatment

In January, Disney did exactly that. Kennedy stepped down after 14 years, and Filoni took over as President and Chief Creative Officer, with Lynwen Brennan as Co-President. The tourists got what they'd demanded for a decade.

They soured on Filoni within months.

I wish I were exaggerating, since exaggeration is half my job. The man they held up as the savior for years is now on the list of people ruining everything, and this week they added Watts beneath him. Kennedy no longer works there, so she's been bumped down to supporting villain.

I don't think any of these people can be made happy, and I suspect they know it. Try this: ask one of them to name the director and the story that would make them excited about Episode X. You'll get a long list of what they don't want. You'll never get a name, because a name is a bet, and a bet that pays off leaves them with nothing to post. Nobody gets a million views for "this seems like a reasonable hire." "DISNEY JUST KILLED STAR WARS" has done numbers for twenty-five years, about a franchise that keeps stubbornly failing to die.

Meanwhile, most actual fans saw the news, remembered that the Skeleton Crew guy is good, and went about their evening. You just don't hear from them, because the algorithm has never paid anyone to be fine.

As for me, I'm a little wary of going back to the Skywalker well, same as a lot of people, and I think Watts is a smart hire anyway. I'll find out whether I'm right in a few years, when there's an actual movie to watch. That's my whole opinion on it. Somewhere right now, a guy is rendering a thumbnail of Jon Watts with glowing red eyes. I hope it does well for him. He'll be making the same video about Episode XI before long.