Director James Mangold recently shared that his scrapped Star Wars film featuring bounty hunter Boba Fett would have been "borderline" R-rated.
During an interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via The Direct), Mangold opened up about his time working on a Boba Fett film for Lucasfilm, which was eventually scrapped in favor of a Disney+ miniseries. "Well, at the point I was doing it, I was probably scaring the shit out of everyone," the director said. "But I was probably making much more of a borderline rated-R kind of spaghetti Western… single-planet, spaghetti western."
Why Was Mangold's Boba Fett Film Scrapped?
Mangold previously revealed earlier this month that he "more than flirted" with the idea of bringing Boba Fett to the big screen. Unfortunately, the film never made it out of development, a notion that Mangold states was because of the poor financial performance of 2018's Solo: A Star Wars Story. "The world would never be able to embrace Baby Yoda if I had made that," Mangold said. "Because it didn’t really belong in the world I was kind of envisioning, but it kind of just… in a moment of kind of corporate re-alignment after whatever happened with the Han Solo movie, they just suddenly decided they weren’t making pictures like that and I think the opportunities in streaming presented themselves."
Disney CEO Bob Iger originally announced plans for a series of character-focused Star Wars spinoff films in February 2013. Boba Fett, Han Solo, Obi-Wan and Yoda were among the characters being considered to headline a spinoff. Josh Trank, the director of the 2015 Fantastic Four reboot, was briefly attached to the Boba Fett film in 2014 and 2015. Mangold reportedly came aboard the project in 2018, but as he mentioned to Happy Sad Confused, all non-Skywalker Saga Star Wars films were put on pause following Solo's disappointing box office performance.
The Boba Fett film was eventually reworked into the Disney+ miniseries, The Book of Boba Fett, which acted as a spinoff/continuation of The Mandalorian. Temuera Morrison starred as the title character in the series, with Ming-Na Wen and Pedro Pascal also appearing as Fennec Shand and Din Djarin, respectively.
James Mangold Helming New Star Wars Movie
Five years after his brief time working on the shelved Boba Fett movie, Mangold was announced to be writing and directing a new movie in the Star Wars galaxy. The untitled feature will reportedly be set 25,000 years before the events of George Lucas' 1977 classic, Star Wars, and explore the birth of the Force. "The Force has become a kind of religious legend that spans through all these movies. But where did it come from? How is it found? Who found it? Who was the first Jedi? And that’s what I'm writing right now," Mangold teased back in April 2023.
The Book of Boba Fett is currently streaming on Disney+. Mangold's untitled Star Wars film does not have a release date at this time.
Source: Happy Sad Confused, via The Direct