Star Wars Racing Movie Being Planned?
Somehow, the upcoming Star Wars projects don't include a podracing movie. Yet?
This article is more than 2 years old
Star Wars is growing. The fanbase has always been large enough to make it feel like the franchise was everywhere. It’s referenced in so many movies, from Without a Paddle to X-Men. It’s been hard to avoid this universe since it began, and it’s only going to become more difficult now that Lucasfilm has so many upcoming movies and television series. It wasn’t that long ago that an Obi-Wan Kenobi spinoff series would have sounded way too far-fetched, but now, it’s happening. Side characters and fan-favorites are being developed in exciting new ways. We’ll see new worlds. The vision will be expanded in ways that used to only be possible with fan-fiction. So why hasn’t the studio started in on a podracer movie yet? Well, according to one insider, that’s about to change.
Insider Daniel Richtman is claiming to have heard that Lucasfilm wants to do a Fast & Furious style racing film for Star Wars. He doesn’t yet say whether the studio has developed the idea further than this. It raises a lot of questions. Many of the upcoming projects center on characters we already know from other Star Wars projects, so would a racing film center on someone we know? Anakin? Someone from The Mandalorian? There has been a lot of mention of podracing, but there is plenty of untapped room to develop that further, especially in a Fast & Furious type movie.
Podracing became a fan-favorite for many in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. While the other racers were all aliens, Anakin Skywalker was the first human to participate. His Jedi reflexes paid off to help keep him alive at a young age. A podracing movie, then, would likely involve many characters who weren’t human.
The podracing idea was of course something that fans wanted to immerse themselves in, so a video game soon followed with Star Wars Episode 1: Racer. The game proved popular. While it included many courses on Tatooine, it also explored some other tracks on other planets. People are still enjoying Racer today on Nintendo Switch.
Why not appeal to that fanbase and build out a racing movie? It seems like such an obvious idea. According to what little Richtman shared, Lucasfilm is thinking of this as a movie, one in a Fast & Furious type of style, which suggests wilder and crazier stunts as the story goes along. It seems likely that if the studio were to create one Star Wars film in this vein, that they’d be open to turning it into its own series, like Fast & Furious, but they’d likely set up the first film to be a possible standalone.
A lot of directors have been discussed over the years for Star Wars films. Most people into making movies will have seen Star Wars, and anyone involved in major franchises would likely be curious to make their own entry in the universe. It would be interesting to see who they might join up with for a podracing movie. Some of the possible directors discussed in the not-too-distant past already have their own projects lined up. One possibility is actually Justin Lin, who is currently working on Fast & Furious. The director has an “I never say never” attitude, experience in space for Star Trek Beyond, and seems like someone who would jump at such an opportunity. For now, we’ll be watching and waiting to see if anything new grows from this rumor.
