Revealed late during Disney’s Investor Day Thursday evening, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is the next Star Wars movie to take to the skies, and the theaters, with a Christmas 2023 release date already penciled in. And it’s a movie that’s clearly close to Jenkins’ heart, as she revealed in the below sizzle video. Seen on a tarmac drenched in the same sunset glow we associate with Top Gun movies, Jenkins spoke candidly about memories of her late father Capt. William T. Jenkins, who served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, and who was her hero growing up. She also explained why those memories brought her to Star Wars and the fabled Rogue Squadrion. “I love to move fast at speed of any kind,” Jenkins said after a brisk rush by the camera on rollerblades. “I think that’s because I grew up the daughter of a great fighter pilot, and every day I would wake up and go outside and look up, and I would see my father and his squadron take off in their F4s, roaring across the sky. It was the most thrilling thing that still I’ve experienced in my entire life.” Those two things are of course the excitement of a life in the sky, and the still all-ages thrill of a Star Wars event on the big screen. It’s a revealing personal testimony from Jenkins, who recently became an A-list director by helming Wonder Woman, a superhero movie unafraid to bask in the earnestness and sense of adventurism of the past, even while telling a refreshingly modern story that stepped away from Hollywood expectation. When I met her in London in 2017, she namechecked films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Casablanca as being just as inspirational to her as any superhero movie. And in their way, the George Lucas Star Wars movies of the past also looked back at the same type of WWII melodramas, with dog fighter adventure movies like The Dam Busters being where the fighter pilot iconography of the Death Star run came from. Of course Star Wars: Rogue Squadron seems like it could be something more poignant still for Jenkins. While the music in the promotional video blatantly echoes the recent trailers for Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, Jenkins is putting her personal, hard-won history as an Air Force brat front and center in a tribute that combines X-Wings with an unapologetic sense of duty. The logline of the film reads, “The story will follow a new generation of starfighter pilots as they earn their wings and risk their lives in a boundary-pushing, high-speed thrill-ride, and move the saga into the future era of the galaxy.” Apparently we’re leaving empires and first orders behind. Clearly their battle, as well as Jenkins’, will continue when Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is released in theaters in December 2023.
