James Mangold is moving on to direct a “Star Wars” tentpole following “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” but it’s not his first go-around with the Lucasfilm franchise. Back in 2018, news broke that Mangold had been hired to direct a movie about the bounty hunter Boba Fett. He was also set to co-write the project with Simon Kinberg, best known as a writer and producer on the “X-Men” movies.
Mangold’s Boba Fett movie never got off the ground, and he recently said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that it wasn’t too surprising given the overall tone of the project.
“At the point I was doing it I was probably scaring the shit out of everyone,” Mangold said. “I was making much more of a borderline R-rated, single planet spaghetti Western. They probably 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.”
Mangold’s Baby Yoda reference brings up the more family-friendly tone of “Star Wars” series such as “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett,” which is how Lucasfilm and Disney decided to continue the story of Boba Fett as opposed to Mangold’s standalone movie. Mangold knew his darker approach would probably scare off Lucasfilm executives, but it was the eventual box office failure of “Solo” that put a pin in his Boba Fett movie.
“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,” Mangold said. “I was just listening to [spaghetti Western composer] Ennio Morricone all day, all night, and typing away. I’m not sure it ever would have happened. I’m not sure it was in anyone’s plans, what I was thinking.”
Mangold is getting a second chance at “Star Wars” with a new movie that will track the origins of The Force. The director has said his new project is inspired by Biblical epics such as “The Ten Commandments.”
“When I mentioned to [Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy] the idea that I had about going backward – really far backward – I was surprised that it excited her and the other wonderful people she works with at Lucasfilm,” the director told io9. “For me, it’s about, I want to be part of the saga, but I also don’t want to be holding so much lore in the air that you can hardly tell a story. And what I really wanted to do, what I told her, was just can we make a kind of the ‘Ten Commandments’ of the Force, you know? A kind of origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.”
Mangold’s Force origin story does not yet have a release date.
