The project pauses; the partnership continues
Taika Waititi says his Star Wars film is on hold while he and screenwriter Tony McNamara work on a different project. The director gave the update directly to Inverse during publicity for Klara and the Sun; Variety reported his comments on October 19. He left open the possibility of returning to Star Wars, but offered no details about the replacement collaboration.
The creative partnership remains worth following. Waititi and McNamara both work with comic disruption, but their strongest material does more than insert jokes into serious surroundings. It changes the terms on which authority gets to appear serious in the first place.
What irreverence can do inside a franchise
Thor: Ragnarok provides the clearest example of Waititi operating within an established cinematic world. Much of its comic energy comes from dismantling the hero's ceremonial dignity. Thor's status repeatedly fails to secure the response he expects. The film can then use the space created by that humiliation to rebuild relationships and redirect the action.
That is different from treating every dramatic beat as an opportunity for a quip. A joke that changes a character's position has consequences. A joke that merely follows an emotional moment can make the moment feel disposable. The distinction matters particularly in Star Wars, where ritual, lineage and inherited responsibility are major sources of dramatic weight.
A filmmaker need not preserve every solemn gesture to respect that world. The original films contain squabbling, impatience and plenty of undignified behavior. But comic deflation becomes less interesting if it never has to leave anything standing. A franchise film needs to decide which relationships still deserve belief after the ceremony has been punctured.
McNamara's characters are trapped in the rules
McNamara's writing for The Favourite offers a more corrosive form of comedy. Access to power changes the meaning of intimacy, kindness and obedience. The funny behavior is inseparable from the system that rewards it. Poor Things uses a different world and tone, but again lets social rules become strange when a character does not accept them as natural.
That suggests a potentially fertile meeting with Waititi's interest in outsiders and adopted families. One approach unsettles the rules; the other often finds feeling among people who do not fit comfortably inside them. A collaboration could let comedy expose a social arrangement while giving the people caught in it more than a function in the joke.
Jojo Rabbit shows why the balance can be difficult and productive. Its childish understanding of a political world creates both comic distortion and a limit that the story must confront. For any new Waititi–McNamara project, the useful question would be whose perspective organizes the absurdity. Without that anchor, eccentricity can become an assortment of entertaining surfaces.
An original world can make a specific argument
Working outside Star Wars could give the pair more freedom to decide what their world means. They would not first have to negotiate its place in an existing mythology or the obligations attached to familiar institutions. That is an opportunity, not a prediction about the unannounced film. An original setting still needs rules strong enough for breaking them to matter.
The advantage would be precision. A court, a household or a workplace can be designed around the particular contradiction a story wants to examine. A joke can reveal how the system operates, rather than pause the story to acknowledge that the audience knows its conventions. The world and the comedy can develop together.
Nor does a franchise automatically prevent distinctive work. The issue is the fit between a filmmaker's method and the material's demands. Sometimes inherited images give a director something useful to push against. Sometimes they consume the attention that a new set of characters needs. Waititi's announcement gives no basis for diagnosing why this particular project paused.
What it does leave is a concrete creative pairing worth following on its own terms. The interesting prospect is not simply seeing familiar comic voices added to lightsabers. It is seeing whether two writers of awkward power relationships can build a story whose jokes expose something, and whose emotional commitments survive the joke. That ambition can travel perfectly well without a hyperspace route.