Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic Movies Will Be Like The Lord Of The Rings

We learned earlier this year that Lucasfilm are officially developing Star Wars movies (and potentially a TV show) based on Knights of the Old Republic. These stories take place thousands of years before the Skywalker saga and began in the early 90s Tales of the Jedi series of comic books. They were eventually developed into the much-loved Bioware and Obsidian Xbox and PC role-playing games Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, which are still some of the best video games that have ever emerged from the franchise.

It’s a great setting, too, with the distant past meaning writers are free from the bounds of continuity and having to crowbar in their narrative around the movies. That means it’s no surprise that Disney and Lucasfilm have plans to work within it, and have hired Laeta Kalogridis (Terminator Genisys, Shutter Island) to pen a script. We haven’t heard much about the project since then, but our sources have now filled us in a bit.

This intel comes from the same insiders who told us back in May that Obi-Wan was definitely happening, with Ewan McGregor reprising his role, so we certainly put some stock into their word. And according to them, Lucasfilm is looking to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series for inspiration and want to have huge battles involving lightsaber-wielding combatants in the KOTOR films.

While that theoretically could be cool, we did sort of see how a large-scale lightsaber battle might look in Attack of the Clones and it wasn’t that great. For my money, lightsabers are much more interesting in close-quarters and personal fights, where you can sense the deadliness of the weapon. And given how lethal they are, a huge battle involving many people fighting with lightsabers would probably end with quite a few limbs lying on the battlefield.

If this were to be the case though, then it seems inevitable that this will be a Jedi vs. Sith battle. At this point in the Star Wars universe, the Sith ‘rule of two’ wasn’t in effect, meaning there can be whole Sith planets trying to invade. In any case, I’d hope that if they do want to take inspiration from The Lord of the Rings for the Knights of the Old Republic movies, they look more to the character development and strong thematic elements in the films rather than the action sequences.