According to Buzzfeed News, three separate sources have now confirmed that a new Star Wars movie based on Knights of the Old Republic is in the works. The article notes that Kalogridis was hired in "spring 2018," a fair amount of time prior to the May 2019 news that D.B. Weiss and David Benioff would be working on a future film.
^ Except io9 notes that Benioff and Weiss were hired in February 2018. And, given that they were probably still busy with GoT at the time, it would seem to me a fairly safe bet, albeit not a certainty, that they're working on the same project.
Thanks for the correction! I thought the Weiss and Benioff news had originally come out much, much earlier than this, but I didn't spend a lot of time hunting down old articles last night. Assuming the Weiss and Benioff project is the same as the Kalogridis (rather than Kalogridis working on the Rian Johnson project), then it sounds like we could have a KOTOR-based movie in 2022, as the first post-Saga film release.
Given the reception that the final season of GoT is getting, Lucasfilm and/or Disney may just rethink their hiring of B&W. I mean anyone else remember when Trevorrow and Trank were each going to get to direct a Star Wars movie? The Mouse does not like the stink of bad press.
The difference is that Trevorrow and Trank both directed box office flops (Book of Henry and Fan4stic), with allegations that Trank was very difficult to work with and caused a lot of problems. GOT Season 8, while divisive, was a massive success, with the finale giving HBO its highest ratings ever.
That's a completely meaningless point, if there ever was one. No one, and I mean absolutely bloody nobody, was ever going to not watch the GoT finale, no matter how much they may have hated previous episodes.
I didn't say the circumstances are identical, just that The Mouse and indeed Lucasfilm aren't afraid to cut directors loose if their bankability goes down or their supposed "talents" are somewhat less than advertised. Indeed, in a sense, the critical reception is MORE important than the box office. They're very protective of their brands and this one in particular, so I could easily see them willing to take a short term financial hit to ensure the tone and level of quality is where they want it to be. Case in point: 'Solo'. There's no question that the quality of writing from GoT has been in steady decline since they ran out of GRRM material to mine, mostly coasting of spectacle. When it came to the climax (where the writing actually matters above all else) they shat the bed. Whether this is because they're just hacks that don't know how to write original material without a pre-existing blueprint or because they just got sick of the thing and stopped caring is irrelevant. The former means they're probably not going to come up with a good script while the latter means they may not have the endurance to stick though a long project (like oh, say a movie trilogy?) In either case, it's cause for concern for LF, at the very least.
Even before this last season of GOT, I was a little surprised when they hired Benioff and Weiss. It seems like the overall opinion of GOT has been in a pretty steady decline for a while now, and was becoming more associated with some of it's more problematic elements, than the actual quality of the show, and those elements are not things I would think Disney or Lucasfilm would want associated with Star Wars.
Tell that to all the people who say they'd boycott Solo, or will boycott TRoS. And that's going to matter to Disney way more than people screaming into the Twitter void. Yeah, they don't have the endurance to finish anything - unlike George R.R. Martin... oh...wait...
Solo was basicly a seperated movie that didn't start or end anything. TRoS will make shittons for Disney, because no matter how much people are complaining, it IS the end of a huge saga and people will watch it in cinema's. There is no doubt about that. Even those that are going in already hating it.