Yahoo Lifestyle James Mangold’s ‘Star Wars’ Movie Is Set 25,000 Years Before ‘Phantom Menace’ So That It’s Not ‘Handcuffed by Lore’: Then ‘You Can’t Please Anybody’
James Mangold, who just picked up a Directors Guild of America nomination for “A Complete Unknown,” recently told MovieWeb that his upcoming “Star Wars” movie is deliberately set thousands of years before any other movie in the long-running franchise so that he doesn’t have to deal with the canon and can thus avoid angering fans. Mangold’s “Star Wars” movie was officially announced in April 2023.
“The ‘Star Wars movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known ‘Star Wars’ movies takes place,” the director told MovieWeb. “It’s an area and a playground that I’ve always [wanted to explore] and that I was inspired by as a teenager. I’m not that interested in being handcuffed by so much lore at this point that it’s almost immovable, and you can’t please anybody.”
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Mangold told io9 last year shortly after his involvement in a “Star Wars” movie was revealed that his project would center on the origins of the Force and how it was “understood, wielded and harnessed” with a vibe similar to Biblical epics such as “The Ten Commandants.” He said then that he was not interested in “holding so much lore in the air that you can hardly tell a story.”
Lucasfilm has not provided any updates on Mangold’s “Star Wars” movie outside of his involvement behind the camera. While Mangold is an Oscar contender this year for helming the Bob Dylan biographical drama, he is no stranger to major Hollywood franchises as the director behind “The Wolverine,” “Logan” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
Mangold spoke to Variety in 2023 ahead of the release of the fifth “Indiana Jones” adventure and said bluntly that he was “not interested” in crafting any spinoffs from the movie because “the amount of lore and Easter eggs and fan service starts to become antithetical to any of this stuff at a certain point. It isn’t storytelling anymore. It’s large-scale advertising.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Mangold suggested he wouldn’t join the Marvel Cinematic Universe mainly because it’s so weighed down by lore and canon these days.
“It’s weird that I’ve even worked in the world of IP entertainment because I don’t like multi-movie universe-building,” Mangold said at the time. “It’s the enemy of storytelling. The death of storytelling. It’s more interesting to people the way the Legos connect than the way the story works in front of us.”
“For me, the goal becomes, always, ‘What is unique about this film, and these characters?’” Mangold continued. “Not making you think about some other movie or some Easter egg or something else, which is all an intellectual act, not an emotional act. You want the movie to work on an emotional level.”
Mangold’s “Star Wars” movie does not yet have a release date.
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