There’s been a lot rumors floating around that Patty Jenkins has been consulting with Michael A. Stackpole for the upcoming Star Wars: Rogue Squadron film. This is where Stackpole himself is making some things clear, and saying that no, he isn’t doing that.

Rogue Squadron Entirely Patty Jenkins’ Baby

Michael A. Stackpole with just brad at GalaxyCon, dated March 19, 2022.
Not his baby, no matter how much some of us might want it to be.

First: some background info for this. Just last week on March 19, 2022, a Twitter user who goes by the handle of “just brad” posted a Tweet of himself at GalaxyCon taking a selfie with none other than the legendary Michael A. Stackpole. While Stackpole has written several original fantasy novel series and BattleTech novels, he’s best known for his Star Wars: X-wing novels. This includes the very first X-wing novel: Rogue Squadron (1996).

"Star Wars: X-wing: Rogue Squadron" novel cover art.
Ah, just as action-packed as we expect a Rogue Squadron novel cover to be like.

Unfortunately, Disney shoved this Rogue Squadron novel into non-canon status (i.e. Star Wars Legends) along with the rest of the Star Wars Expanded Universe when they bought the rights to it. That hasn’t stopped fans from wanting more of the Expanded Universe to become canon again. In fact, the aforementioned Twitter post seemed to imply it when Michael A. Stackpole himself assured just brad that “Patty Jenkins had been in contact with him early on”.

Michael A. Stackpole: Oops

As it turns out, those were some poor choice of words.

Naturally, a good percentage of the Star Wars fandom took this as a sign that Michael A. Stackpole is heavily involved with the upcoming Star Wars: Rogue Squadron film by Patty Jenkins. Except that he isn’t. Just a short while ago, according to Comic Book, Stackpole clarified his words at GalaxyCon. Stackpole’s clarification reads:

“I know the tweet said that she had consulted with me. No, no, no. And, like she needs to talk to me? Holy crap. I think she knows her way around a film. Again, in things she has said about the story publicly, she has been very nice in name-checking me and referring to the books and I can’t thank her enough for doing that. But, as of this point, I know only as much as you guys know and, still, will be the first guy at the theater to go see it.”

So yeah, Patty Jenkins apparently name-checked Michael A. Stackpole and will make references to his novel. However, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron will be entirely her baby, with Stackpole having no involvement in it. Your mileage may vary on this bit of news. Before you get mad over it though, I might remind you all that it will be a long, long while before we see this film. Disney originally set the release date as December 22, 2023; after all. Not only that, but they just recently delayed production to 2022, so that release date might very well change in the near future (although Disney has not done so yet as of this writing).

Source: Twitter, Comic Book