Star Wars: James Mangold Reportedly “More Than Flirted” With a Boba Fett Movie

Ahead of the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, there seemed to be limitless potential for other beloved characters to get spin-off films, which included reports emerging just days ahead of Solo‘s release that James Mangold was tapped to helm a Boba Fett film. In the years since those reports emerged, various figures involved with that reported project have offered different explanations for the veracity of those talks, with Mangold recently noting that the project saw him “more than flirting” with such a spinoff. The seeds of that notion were seemingly reimagined into the spin-off TV series Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett.

In support of Mangold’s upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Variety detailed, “Mangold had ‘more than flirted’ years earlier with making a Boba Fett movie that would have been a one-off spaghetti Western in the vein of Sergio Leone.”

While The Book of Boba Fett seemingly channeled some of those concepts from the original pitch, it wasn’t quite a straightforward Western as the outlet reports, with that being merely one of the tones that was experimented with.

Back in November of 2021, however, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy cast doubt on there being any substantial development on such a project.

“There really was virtually no previous development. We never got very far with Josh [Trank], quite frankly, because we never developed anything specific with him,” Kennedy confirmed with Empire Magazine. “And Jim Mangold never worked on a Boba Fett story.”

Given that “more than flirted” isn’t a concrete update, as far as how much effort Mangold invested in a script or a story, it’s possible he was more invested than Lucasfilm or that the studio merely has different definitions for how concrete such a collaboration would be. Regardless of how far along that project might have been, it was through those talks that Mangold was enlisted to develop an entirely different film for the franchise.

“I said, ‘Yes, but it seems like everything you’re developing is continuing forward,’” Mangold recalled to the outlet about being asked to develop another story for the series. He instead pitched “a Ten Commandments about the dawning of the Force … It is basically, for fans, a kind of religion. What is it to have found this power and not even understand what it is?”

Stay tuned for updates on Mangold’s upcoming Star Wars movie.

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