James Mangold is setting his Star Wars a long, long time ago to avoid tangled lore
Mangold's Star Wars prequel will take place 25,000 years before any of the other films.
Image: 20th Century Studios
Between the films, shows, video games, comics, and probably a napkin or two sitting around George Lucas’ estate, the Star Wars canon has gotten so complicated it would be nearly impossible to tell an original story without stumbling on some sort of trip wire. James Mangold, who’s on the hook for a “Ten Commandants“-esque prequel about how the Force was “understood, wielded and harnessed,” has a bold new solution: predate that booby trap altogether.
“The Star Wars movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known Star Wars movies takes [sic] place,” the A Complete Unknown director told MovieWeb of his film (working title, Dawn Of The Jedi). “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.”
It’s the same strategy that spinoffs like House Of The Dragon and Dune: Prophecy have utilized in recent years, though Mangold’s film is journeying a much longer time ago. (HOTD and Dune: Prophecy went back about 200 and 10,000 years from their original timelines, respectively.) Hopefully, it will finally address one of this writer’s biggest pet peeves about all these prequel projects: The fashion, architecture, and speech patterns should be different from the original properties! Culture doesn’t stay the same over that many decades, much less centuries!
We’ll see if he falls into the same trap when the film actually comes out. (As of this writing, neither Disney nor LucasFilm has provided a timeline.) Still, Mangold has clearly been weighing these ideas for a while. “It’s weird that I’ve even worked in the world of IP entertainment because I don’t like multi-movie universe-building,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “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.”