R-Rated Boba Fett Movie Revealed And It Sounds Way Better Than The Show
James Mangold reveals that his axed Boba Fett movie would've been much darker than The Book of Boba Fett series.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold recently discussed his canceled Boba Fett solo movie and it sounds awesome! Variety reports that Mangold revealed some fun tidbits about the axed project on the newest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. The director says his “Borderline R-rated” concept most likely scared the “sh*t” out of everyone at Lucasfilm.
“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 said when discussing the tone of his lost Boba Fett movie.
Much like the scrapped Stephen Daldry and Hossein Amini Obi-Wan Kenobi film, Mangold’s Boba Fett movie was ultimately sidelined by the poor performance of Solo at the box office. The Ron Howard-directed origin story was a guinea pig of sorts.
Had it been a blockbuster megahit, Disney was prepared to do a series of character-focused films, including Obi-Wan, Boba Fett, and a Lando Calrissian movie starring Solo’s Donald Glover.
Unfortunately for Lucasfilm, Solo underperformed at the box office, leading the studio to mothball all the other “solo” projects in development, including James Mangold’s Boba Fett movie. Eventually, the Obi-Wan and Boba Fett projects would find new life as limited series on Disney’s streaming service Disney+.
Sadly, the family-friendly Book of Boba Fett that fans eventually got was light years away from Mangold’s original concept.
Mangold, however, isn’t content to put the blame entirely on Solo‘s abysmal theatrical run. While the director did mention a “corporate realignment” as one of the reasons he didn’t get to make his dream project, he also admits he’s not sure Disney would have ever allowed him to make the movie he wanted to make even if Solo grossed billions at the box office.
“I’m not sure it was in anyone’s plans, what I was thinking,” Mangold confessed.
The director went on to explain how he listened to music from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly composer Ennio Morricone constantly while he wrote the script for his Boba Fett movie. Morricone’s spaghetti western scores helped Mangold get in the right headspace for the bloody space-cowboy movie he was envisioning. A movie that, sadly, fans will never get to see.
The Force works in mysterious ways, however. James Mangold is getting a do-over when it comes to directing a movie set in the Star Wars universe—although it still won’t be his abandoned Boba Fett movie, unfortunately. Instead, Mangold is working on a movie that would explore the origins of The Force itself.
The director was inspired by epics such as The Ten Commandments to do a more spiritual take on Star Wars.
Mangold explained that part of the reason he wanted to make a movie set way before everything else in the saga was so that he wouldn’t have to work around established lore and could instead just focus on telling a compelling story. Mangold calls his upcoming project “A kind of origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.
That’s all well and good, but Mangold’s historical Force epic won’t do much to ease the broken hearts of Star Wars fans still mourning the kick-a** Boba Fett movie that could have been. Now that Mangold has actually described his scrapped movie, it just makes the pain worse for fans disappointed by The Book of Boba Fett.
Hearing about the forgotten Boba Fett movie is cool and all, but to paraphrase the man himself, “It’s no good to us dead.”
