Gina Carano joined one of the most successful franchises in entertainment history when she landed the role of Cara Dune in The Mandalorian, but her future in Star Wars isn't going to extend to spinoffs or movies or even more Mandalorian. Carano was fired following Season 2 due to controversial comments on social media, with no signs of any chance of being brought back to reprise the role despite some possible trolling from the actress. Now, Carano is moving forward and landed her first post-Mandalorian project, and it's pretty perfectly on brand.
The former Mandalorian actress will star in an upcoming movie that will see her playing a character looking for revenge. Deadline reports that the movie, which has yet to receive a title, will be an action thriller centered on a woman who survived an attempt on her life by a trucker serial killer, and instead of being defeated by her trauma, hires a long-haul trucker to try and track the killer down and stop him for good. Spurred on by memories of what happened to her and law enforcement failures to get the killer behind bars, she'll clearly be very highly motivated.
In the grand scheme of things, it sounds like the project will be action-heavy for Gina Carano, which is right up her alley, based on her past work. Carano is producing as well as starring in the untitled movie, with filming set to begin in October and take place in Montana, Tennessee, and Utah. Given that this is Carano's first project since The Mandalorian and getting fired by Disney couldn't be good for anybody's career, producing her own project may have been her best option for her first followup.
The project will reportedly have similarities to True Grit, Duel, and Breakdown, which do deal with various forms of revenge and road-based crimes. The movie will be based on the Eric Red novel called White Knuckle, with Red writing the script. Red has experience with penning scripts for the big screen, with the horror films Near Dark and The Hitcher under his belt. The Hitcher actually had a plot with some similar elements to the Gina Carano project, centered on a young man who is stalked by a murderous hitchhiker after escaping from him.
Gina Carano has been pretty definitively cut from the Star Wars universe and Disney brand, with Carano reportedly removed from a Nat Geo appearance after her firing, and the Mandalorian spinoff said to feature her no longer in active development, but neither her firing nor her social media comments resulted in a universal drop in popularity. In fact, Carano got even more popular on social media after being fired, although it's worth noting that she also probably wound up on more social media users' radar after her firing due to Twitter trends and media coverage, even for those who don't watch The Mandalorian.
Her comments about her firing certainly don't indicate that there's any chance of her being invited back as Cara Dune in any project, even though she was included in Disney's awards campaign as revealed back in June. The Star Wars definitely isn't going anywhere, with The Book of Boba Fett as the first Mandalorian spinoff planned for a release before the end of the year, and plenty of more action in that galaxy far, far away on the way in the coming years. As for Gina Carano, her future involves the film featuring a murderous trucker.
