Prospective Star Wars director James Mangold has opened up regarding the tone of his scrapped Boba Fett movie.
Mangold is currently attached to write and direct a Star Wars film about the dawn of the Jedi, set roughly 25,000 years before the events of 1977’s A New Hope. However, during a recent interview with Variety, Mangold conceded that he “more than flirted” with making a Boba Fett movie a few years ago. (Both Mangold and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy had previously denied the unproduced project’s existence.)
Apparently, Mangold’s Boba Fett movie would have been a standalone Spaghetti Western inspired by the works of Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars). The film never came to fruition, and was eventually reworked into Lucasfilm’s Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett (a spin-off of The Mandalorian). Mangold instead ended up directing another Lucasfilm project in the form of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
It was on the set of Dial of Destiny that Kennedy asked Mangold if he was still interested in tackling a Star Wars project. “I said, ‘Yes, but it seems like everything you’re developing is continuing forward,’” Mangold told Variety. The filmmaker subsequently pitched “a ‘Ten Commandments’ about the dawning of the Force.” “It is basically, for fans, a kind of religion,” Mangold explained. “What is it to have found this power and not even understand what it is?”
Kennedy evidently loved the idea. “Jim’s pretty fast — he’s already got the basic treatment laid out in his head,” she said. Kennedy added that, once the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike is over, Mangold “has every intention of wanting to move this forward very aggressively, and we want to support that.”
What happened with James Mangold’s supposed Boba Fett film?
In May 2018, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Mangold was developing a Boba Fett movie for Lucasfilm. The supposed project would have been the third entry in the studio’s big-screen “Star Wars Story” anthology series, following 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
At the time, however, Mangold was quick to throw cold water on the report. “I’m making a period car racing movie [with] Christian Bale [and] Matt Damon,” the filmmaker tweeted, referring to 2019 release Ford v Ferrari. “No Mandalorians involved. Stop reading so much gossip.” As previously mentioned, Boba Fett would eventually lead the charge in not a movie, but a Disney+ series (with no involvement from Mangold).
Ahead of The Book of Boba Fett’s premiere, Kennedy addressed Fantastic Four director Josh Trank’s unproduced Boba Fett movie. She also appeared to debunk the idea of Mangold ever working on a similar project. “There really was virtually no previous development [of a Boba Fett project],” Kennedy told Empire Magazine in 2021. “We never got very far with Josh, quite frankly, because we never developed anything specific with him. And Jim Mangold never worked on a Boba Fett story.”
What’s next for Star Wars?
Mangold’s Ten Commandments-esque Star Wars film was one of three new big-screen franchise entries Lucasfilm announced at Star Wars Celebration 2023. The studio also confirmed that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel) was attached to direct a film set 15 years after the events of 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Additionally, longtime Star Wars creative Dave Filoni will direct a film that serves as the grand finale of The Mandalorian and its spin-offs.
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