James Mangold drops a few details regarding the tone and style of his scrapped take on the popular bounty hunter character, Boba Fett.
James Mangold is working squarely under the Lucasfilm banner these days. Not only does he have Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny currently out in cinemas but at some point, he’ll be attempting to do what many filmmakers have tried and failed: wrestling a Star Wars film from development into production.
That project is set to be a Dawn of the Jedi-style film, examining Star Wars some 25,000 years before the events of the Skywalker Saga. However, it’s not Mangold’s first Star Wars experience as a few years ago, he was bought aboard to helm a standalone Boba Fett film.
Mangold has chatted to the HappySadConfused podcast about the process, recalling:
“At the point I was doing it I was probably scaring the ‘word begins with s’ out of everyone. I was making much more of a borderline R-rated, kind of single-planet spaghetti Western. The world would never be able to embrace Baby Yoda if I had made that. It didn’t really belong in the world I was kind of envisioning.”
Things took a turn with the release of 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. The film underperformed critically and commercially and plans for more standalone ‘story’ films were scrapped.
“In a moment of corporate realignment or whatever happened with the Han Solo movie, they just suddenly decided they weren’t making pictures like that, and the opportunities in streaming presented themselves,” says Mangold. “I’m not sure it ever would have happened. I’m not sure it was in anyone’s plans, what I was thinking.”
The filmmaker’s comments demonstrate the lack of joined-up thinking that has plagued Lucasfilm for years at this point. Commissioning Mangold to write the version of a film (that even he admits probably wasn’t what anybody wanted) illustrates the lack of planning that has resulted in films being criticised upon release, if they even release at all. Mangold’s words also directly contradict past comments by Lucasfilm boss, Kathleen Kennedy who in 2021 told Empire that the filmmaker had never worked on a Boba Fett movie.
Perhaps this time around Mangold will get to see his Star Wars project through, but excuse us if we don’t allow ourselves to get too excited. You can catch Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny in cinemas right now.
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