Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson has been doing a TON of press lately about the upcoming film, but since no one has seen it, a lot of the questions he’s been answering have to do with his recently announced new trilogy in the franchise. Though all we know is it will have nothing to do with the Skywalkers, fans have been speculating wildly about which corner of the Star Wars universe he’d take us. But while the director is pretty tight-lipped about the new movies, one thing we can be sure of is that it will not be Knights of the Old Republic.

In the period of time following the original Star Wars trilogy, tons of spin-off material found its was to fans, via novels, games, comics, and more, and a great many of them had to do with the characters we already knew—Luke, Leia, Han, and the gang. But in the 2003, the Knights of the Old Republic video games began, depicting characters—usually Jedi—from thousands of years before the original movies. This became a favorite avenue of Star Wars lore for fans, and the hope arose that we’d see films set in this version of the galaxy far, far away.

Speaking to Mashable, Johnson quickly dispelled any hopes for his movies to be set during this period. “Oh, they love Knights of the Old Republic…I played that game when it first came out and it was like, god, I loved it. Yeah, that’s a fantastic game. And I understand it, the instinct to automatically go to something that you know and love, that you’ve already seen.”

But, nope, this will not be the case. “To me,” he says, “what’s really fun is the notion of what new stuff are we gonna see, what new stories can we tell?”

Technically this doesn’t mean that these movies won’t take place during the time of the Old Republic, but my money is on them being set either during the original trilogy (just completely removed from the action) or during/after the new one. Just a gut feeling, but since Johnson keeps using the word “new,” I doubt he’d be so quick to go back to the old, even if it’s an old we’ve never seen.

Images: Lucasarts

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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