James Mangold is currently doing the rounds promoting his franchise-ending duties with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, so naturally questions have turned towards another Lucasfilm IP with which he has been entrusted – Star Wars.
Back in April at the Star Wars Celebration in London, it was announced that Mangold, who for a long time was linked with a standalone Boba Fett movie, would be directing one of three new Star Wars movies to hit the big-screen. It will be set 25,000 years before the events of the current films, focusing on an era called ‘Dawn of the Jedi’ which will explore the earliest Jedi to use the force.
Mangold recently sat down with Gizmodo’s io9 to clarify a few things about what he is calling “the Ten Commandments of the Force”.
“Well, I’ve talked to [Lucasfilm] before and even worked a bit before on other projects,” he said. “And I’m always interested in what’s going on there and have friends who work on other Star Wars projects. But I understood that much of what they were doing was kind of continuing the saga forward.”
“So when I mentioned to Kathy [Kennedy] the idea that I had about going backward—really far backward—I was surprised that it excited her and the other wonderful people she works with at Lucasfilm,” he added. “For me, it’s about, I want to be part of the saga, but I also don’t want to be holding so much lore in the air that you can hardly tell a story. And what I really wanted to do, what I told her, was just can we make a kind of the Ten Commandments of the Force, you know? A kind of origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.”
As well as the tentatively titled Dawn of the Jedi, it was also announced that Daisy Ridley’s Rey would return in an as-yet-untiled movie from director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel) and writer Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), which will take place 15 years after the events of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in a time- period Lucasfilm has dubbed ‘New Jedi Order’.
Disney recently performed a release date shuffle which meant an untitled Star Wars movie previously scheduled for December 19th, 2025 has been shifted back to May 22nd, 2026, and an additional untitled Star Wars film has been added, set for release on December 18th, 2026. They already had a separate untitled Star Wars project set for a December 17th, 2027 release. And you thought understanding Midi-chlorians was difficult.
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