A movie based on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic — the beloved video game first released in 2003 — is currently being written by Laeta Kalogridis (Avatar, Shutter Island) for Lucasfilm, three sources close to the project told BuzzFeed News. The project should be welcome news to the Star Wars fandom, who may be feeling beaten down after Solo's disappointing box office led Lucasfilm to reevaluate the franchise's ambitions and scale back the studio's release schedule. Knights of the Old Republic, nicknamed KOTOR by its devotees, is a role-playing game about Jedi versus the Sith set nearly 4,000 years before the events of 1977's Star Wars: A New Hope. Fans have long yearned for its rich story to be adapted to film. At Star Wars Celebration in April, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy told MTV News, "Yes, we are developing something to look at," after being asked about KOTOR. "Right now, I have no idea where things might fall."

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images Laeta Kalogridis at the premiere of Alita: Battle Angel.

Kalogridis is close to finishing the first script of a potential KOTOR trilogy, according to the three sources. She is the first woman writer of a Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, when Leigh Brackett received a cowriting credit with Lawrence Kasdan. Lucasfilm has been criticized for hiring only white men to shepherd the world of Star Wars. Representatives for Kalogridis, Lucasfilm, and Disney did not respond to BuzzFeed News' requests for comment. Disney announced earlier this month that after J.J. Abrams' new Star Wars movie — The Rise of Skywalker, which will close out the nine-film Skywalker family saga in December — the next film in the franchise will be released in December 2022. That film, by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, will be the first of a new trilogy, and, according to Disney, will come out "pre-Christmas weekend every other year." While there are many corners of the formidable Star Wars internet that have speculated that Benioff and Weiss will be the stewards of KOTOR, Kalogridis was hired in spring 2018 to develop the property. In the KOTOR game, the player helps fight an uprising against the Republic led by the villainous Darth Malak, a Sith Lord. The player eventually joins forces with Bastila Shan, a Jedi Knight and one of the most revered women characters in the Star Wars extended universe. The story has Wookiees, droids, the Jedi Academy, and the Force — a wealth of material to be mined.