While Disney has shied away from Star Wars movies for a while now, focusing on Disney Plus shows, they want to get back to theaters soon enough. One of the highest profile projects is an upcoming Rey movie which will focus on the character after the events of the last trilogy.
The film is leaving past directors JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson behind, and it will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, an award-winning Pakistani director who recently did two episodes of Ms. Marvel, the MCU’s best-reviewed project ever.
We know close to nothing about the Rey movie, but Obaid-Chinoy briefly spoke about it to CNN where she said:
“We’re in 2024. It’s about time we have a woman shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”
This, naturally, has upset the type of “Rey is a Mary Sue” crowd from the sequel trilogy, with many of them misreading the quote as “there have never been women doing anything in Star Wars,” listing off many female characters from Rey herself to Leia, Ahsoka and others.
Of course, she’s talking about being the first female director of a Star Wars movie. Episodes of some of the Star Wars shows have been directed by women like Bryce Dallas Howard and Deborah Chow. Chow was also the showrunner and director of every episode of the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. But yes, it’s significant that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is the first woman directing a full Star Wars theatrical release…ever.
This quote reminds me of when Brie Larson said she wanted the Captain Marvel press tour more diverse:
“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male…Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive.”
This caused an outrage among the Marvel fanboy community that led to Captain Marvel to be mercilessly review bombed and Brie Larson to be hounded and harassed to this day. Obaid-Chinoy is effectively saying the same thing about the lack of diversity in Star Wars direction. In 2018, calculations said that 96% of Star Wars’ directors and writers across the whole franchise were white men. But now Obaid-Chinoy is being lambasted for pointing that out, or by people willingly misreading her quote to be about female Star Wars characters.
This is…going to be a nightmare. I’m happy to see Rey back. I’m happy to see a woman of color directing a Star Wars movie. But I lived through the exhaustion of the sequel trilogy discourse and if this single quote is spawning this reaction already, it’s clear we are gearing up for another full round of this as people refuse to grow up or learn to understand the context of quotes like this. Here we go again.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
