In late 2020, Patty Jenkins donned the iconic Rebel flight suit and strode across the tarmac toward an X-wing to announce Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, a movie that was supposed to release in December 2023. Little has been seen of it since, leading to speculation that it was quietly canceled, though Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy continues to insist that it could still happen.
What no one realized was that we actually got our Rogue Squadron movie last year. That movie was Top Gun: Maverick, which set IMAX theaters around the world ablaze with its incredible aerial stunts, grossing more than a billion-and-a-half dollars in the international box office.
Maverick was billed as a sequel to Tony Scott’s paean to fighter jets and beach volleyball, but it bore far more in common with George Lucas’ space opera than real-life fighter combat. It took the excitement of the original’s flight sequences and pushed them to Mach 5, with twisting dogfights resembling A New Hope’s Trench Run. Replace Tom Cruise’s F-18 with an X-wing and it’s not hard to imagine Maverick as a Star Wars film, with a veteran Wedge Antilles as its star.
Top Gun: Maverick makes a Rogue Squadron movie more obvious than ever
Top Gun: Maverick makes a Rogue Squadron movie or television series seem more obvious than ever, but in recent years, starfighters have increasingly taken a backseat to lightsabers, bounty hunters, and grim and gritty political drama. With smaller budgets owing to the franchise’s pivot to streaming, and without the spectacle of the big screen, there’s simply less incentive to feature truly memorable space battles. Aside from a handful of great moments, like Mandalorian Season 3’s battle with a gang of space pirates, starfighters like Captain Teva’s X-wing are mostly around to play traffic cop.
With Star Wars increasingly willing to embrace the old Expanded Universe though, there’s plenty of room to bolster one of the most underserved areas of the Star Wars fandom. After all, great space combat is one of Star Wars’ birthrights. Close your eyes and you can probably imagine Red Squadron rising toward the Death Star or Admiral Ackbar yelling “It’s a trap!” as waves of TIE Interceptors crash toward the Rebel fleet, or Anakin offering a grinning “This is where the fun begins” as he weaves through a Separatist Fleet in his Jedi Starfighter.
Top Gun: Maverick took the excitement of the original’s flight sequences and pushed them to Mach 5, with twisting dogfights resembling A New Hope’s Trench Run
Jedi get all the attention but Star Wars has a rich tradition of games, novels, and toys that tap into the fandom’s love of the setting’s starships. Old-school fans may recall the lengthy debates over the Super Star Destroyer and the “five mile fallacy” or paging through old technical manuals. Elsewhere, Star Wars miniatures games recreating its space battles have enjoyed great popularity with the tabletop community.
In the 80s and 90s, game developers treated recreating the Trench Run as a kind of holy grail. One of the earliest Star Wars games ever, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, featured a wireframe run through the Death Star, and many more would attempt to replicate that climactic moment in the years to follow. LucasArts’ X-wing and TIE Fighter series expanded on that conceit still further by mixing arcade-style shoot ‘em up combat with light flight simulator mechanics, imbuing Star Wars’ familiar fighters with a sense of weight and realism. Among their contributions to the Star Wars were an early glimpse of Coruscant, the first depiction of Grand Admiral Thrawn outside of the novels, and the TIE Defender, which featured in a terrific episode of Star Wars Rebels.
LucasArts’ X-wing games would inspire Michael Stackpole to launch his fantastic run with Rogue Squadron – a series of novels in which famous ace Wedge Antilles puts together a new squadron of pilots and embarks on a series of adventures.
“Little did we know that there were tons of Star Wars fans who loved Wedge, loved the pilots,” Stackpole recalled in a 2016 interview. “And boy, when those books hit the New York Times bestsellers list… and especially the third one… When Kratos Trap came out, Stephen King had five books on the paperback bestseller list, and no one thought Kratos Trap would make it. But it actually knocked one of Stephen King’s books off the list.”
Characters like Wedge and Poe Dameron are easier to relate to than Jedi like Luke, Rey, and Ahsoka, who are the superheroes of the Star Wars universe
Stackpole’s novels were some of the best in the old Expanded Universe, replete with details like Rebel pilots referring to TIE Fighters as “Eyeballs” or complaining about the sluggishness of Y-wings. They captured a different side of George Lucas’ setting, sidelining Jedi in favor of the high adventure of piloting an X-wing against waves of TIE Fighters. Jenkins would name Stackpole as one of her nascent movie’s influences in a 2021 interview, saying that it was important for Rogue Squadron to honor Stackpole’s work.
“The Michael Stackpole books and the video games and all of the Rogue Squadron books, there’s an incredible history that’s really important to honor,” she said. “And yet, it must be brought to a new age, because we have to tell a new story with it and so you’re trying to blend the best of everything and make it the great fighter-pilot movie, which I’ve always wanted to make, as well. It’s a big brew of things that you’re trying to put together and still try to keep a simple story.”
Secret heroes
The appeal in these stories is the way that they ground the setting, featuring highly-skilled but otherwise fairly normal pilots in extraordinary circumstances. Characters like Wedge and Poe Dameron are easier to relate to than Jedi like Luke, Rey, and Ahsoka, who are the superheroes of the Star Wars universe, their adventures lending a sense of texture it otherwise lacks.
You could even say that Wedge is the secret hero of the original trilogy, playing a key role in all three major battles, including taking down the second Death Star alongside Lando while Luke is occupied with the Emperor. Wedge is a one-dimensional character at best, but his recurring appearances in the movies offer all sorts of creative opportunities, especially given Rogue Squadron’s prominence in the lore. Who is this ace pilot who survived the original Trench Run? What did he do after the war? One can imagine Wedge in a role similar to Maverick, living alone in a hangar alongside his X-wing, surrounded by ghostly memories of Biggs, Jek, and Dak.
On the Imperial side, there’s Soontir Fel, leader of the 181st Imperial Fighter Wing and another Stackpole creation. With their distinctive black helmets and dark cockpits, TIE pilots have long captured the imaginations of Star Wars fans. One team of fans even went so far as to create a truly astonishing seven-minute anime movie featuring the Empire’s pilots.
We associate the silhouette of the X-wing and the roar of the TIE Fighter with Star Wars as much as we do the hiss of the lightsaber
It’s no coincidence that Rogue One, praised for its more grounded depiction of the Rebellion, is also home to the Battle of Scarif, one of the best Star Wars space battles since Return of the Jedi. Writing about Rogue One in 2016, The Verge tied the Battle of Scarif to the X-wing novels of old. “Rogue One reminded me of why I loved Stackpole’s X-Wing novels so much: they’re a reminder that the Star Wars universe doesn’t need to be exclusively carried on the backs of the Skywalker family. Rogue Squadron introduced us to a rich cast of characters that felt right at home in the world, much as the latest film has done with the likes of Jyn Erso, Captain Cassian and K-2SO.”
Is Lucasfilm paying attention?
Knowing all this, it’s curious that Lucasfilm hasn’t done more to leverage this part of the Star Wars universe. Just take a look at the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park, which is dotted with X-wings and A-wings alongside the Millennium Falcon. It’s proof that we associate the silhouette of the X-wing and the roar of the TIE Fighter with Star Wars as much as we do the hiss of the lightsaber. Luke Skywalker’s most triumphant moment was behind the stick of an X-wing. Even Darth Vader was arguably at his most impressive in the cockpit of his TIE Advanced.
Like everything else to do with Star Wars though, Rogue Squadron seems to have been lost in Lucasfilm’s messy pivot following the sequel trilogy, which saw it temporarily abandon theaters in favor of Disney’s streaming service. A little more than a year after its reveal, Rogue Squadron was delayed indefinitely amid rumors of “creative differences” between Jenkins and Lucasfilm.
We’re well into 2023 now and Top Gun: Maverick’s staggering success is making Lucasfilm and Disney look more foolish by the day for not being able to get a Rogue Squadron movie off the ground. Under Disney’s ownership, Star Wars has increasingly come to resemble the MCU in structure and tone, but Star Wars was never a superhero franchise in space. It’s a sprawling space opera that’s in many respects closer to Dune than it is to the Avengers, and stories like Rogue Squadron are a part of that.
With Top Gun, Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer gave us a glimpse of what an epic featuring X-wings and TIE Fighters might look like, hinting at potential blockbuster success for Star Wars in the process. Is Disney paying attention?
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
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