Rumor: Obi-wan Kenobi standalone film in pre-production for 2020

It’s time for our perennial Obi-wan movie rumor to resurface! This time it comes via the fan site Fantha Tracks, who has a source that claims to have seen documents at Pinewood. A director (perhaps Stephen Daldry, the subject of the last rumor), writing team and even the art department are “in full pre-production mode,” with the movie expected to begin filming after Episode IX is done.

Ewan McGregor has been regularly asked if he’s willing to return for more Star Wars ever since spinoffs were announced, and he’s always said he’s up for more. If they are indeed this far along, it seems likely that he’s on board, or will be soon.

The current canon hasn’t done much with Kenobi’s Tatooine exile period – he appeared in the Rebels episode ‘Twin Suns’, bring Darth Maul’s story to a close, plus a few stories in the From A Certain Point of View anthology. John Jackson Miller’s Legends novel Kenobi, a story set not long after Revenge of the Sith, was fairly well received, and could conceivably still fit within the current canon. (Though I think a straight adaptation is unlikely.)

Although sets of films from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been announced, Lucasfilm has been mum on any sort of schedule or timeframe for the post-IX releases.

I’m not super skeptical about this rumor – an Obi-wan intertrilogy standalone has always seemed inevitable – but I do always maintain a baseline cynicism about unannounced projects. In other words: We’ll see.