The Star Wars universe has been a mixed bag of late. Lucasfilm seems very invested in telling longer-form Star Wars stories on television, expanding out the mythology with shows like The Acolyte, the continuation of The Mandalorian, and the kid-friendly skew of the upcoming adventure, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. As of now, it has been five years since Lucasfilm released a full-fledged Star Wars movie in theaters with Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker – a movie that didn’t rank very high on our list of the best Star Wars movies. That’s not due to a complete lack of trying, as many filmmakers haven been trying to play in the Star Wars sandbox for years now… Zack Snyder included.
There was a time when you couldn’t go a month without hearing about a new person getting an announced Star Wars movie. Shawn Levy, red hot right now thanks to Deadpool and Wolverine, had a deal to make a Star Wars movie, as did his boss at Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige. Taika Waititi had been attached to the Star Wars universe. Same for David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the guys behind Game of Thrones. Hell, at one point, Rian Johnson was flirting with making a Star Wars trilogy. Nothing ever came of it.
And then there is Zack Snyder, a self-proclaimed Star Wars geek who has dabbled in wildly popular IP before (he helmed a Dawn of the Dead remake and adapted Watchmen into a stunning feature film before fully embracing his unique vision for DC Comics). The director is back in the spotlight thanks to the release of his two director’s cuts for Rebel Moon, arriving on Netflix on Friday, August 2. And while we knew that Rebel Moon started a long time ago as a pitch Snyder made to Lucasfilm to make a Star Wars movie, I’m not sure we ever found out how he wanted this story to fit into the overall epic saga of Star Wars… or the reasons why Lucasfilm passed. So when Snyder stopped by CinemaBlend’s official ReelBlend podcast to discuss Rebel Moon, and his filmography, we dove into the Star Wars portion of these movies’ histories, to finally get it all on record.
‘It was really a fan-fiction film.’
The logline for Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon makes it sound very much like something inspired by Star Wars, or a story set in the Star Wars universe. When the innocent farming community of Veldt is threatened by the evil Imperium and forced to overdeliver on a crop supply to feed the wicked army, a former soldier named Kora (Sofia Boutella) agrees to round up a band of rebel fighters to protect the harvest moon and beat back the sadistic Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein). It’s part Star Wars, part Kurosawa, and part A Bug’s Life, for all the Pixar fans out there.
But in another reality, this might have been a Star Wars movie, and could have been the feature that gave Snyder a chance to play in a sandbox he’d grown up in, and been inspired by. The idea for Rebel Moon dates back to Snyder’s college days, as he tells ReelBlend:
I've been putting (Kora’s) story together for, oh gosh, for 20 or 30 years, or something like that. But you know, in fits and starts. I wouldn't say I was working on her for 30 years. That's crazy. But yeah, I've been working on her for a while. She's just an interesting… she’s very attractive to my mythological view of storytelling, and mythology in general. And she really fits the, she really fits the Joseph Campbell-ian model.
You can see comparisons between Kora and a traditional Star Wars hero, like Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) or Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). They appear to be outsiders, living a quiet life on either Veldt (in Rebel Moon) or the desert planet of Tatooine. But as you peel back the layers on Kora, you realize she has much deeper connections to the “Dark Side” of the story, which will make it difficult for her to complete her mission.
There might have been a time when Lucasfilm would have been interested in telling this story. But that specific moment in time came and went once Lucasfilm sold their assets to Disney. As Snyder explained to ReelBlend, there was a time when his vision of a mature, R-rated Star Wars might have been appealing. Then, it went away. Snyder told us:
(The meeting) was with Kathleen Kennedy, and it was… in those days before the sale, there was a moment in time when Star Wars was in this weird place. And I felt like my story was very much about – it was really a fan-fiction film in a lot of ways. And the fact that I really wanted it to be rated R, and I didn't want any recurring (Star Wars) characters from canon. There were a bunch of things I wanted to do that were very specific, which I feel like, in retrospect, sort of fits in some ways into kind of what they've done in some ways not. It was fun. For me, I'm a big Star Wars fan, so it was a big… I thought it was great.
Zack Snyder grew up during a period when blockbuster filmmaking absolutely was influenced by everything George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were doing. Whether intentional or not, movies like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien (and its immediate sequel, Aliens), Blade Runner, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark were shaping the minds and imaginations of up-and-coming storytellers. And you can see that DNA in the work that Snyder does, though he also explores weightier topics that tend to push the envelope of his content.
Does that mean his shot at making a mature Star Wars movie is done? Let’s never say never.
'It was an outlier, and didn't really belong.'
As we talked about, Star Wars projects come and go. Directors and showrunners get attached to Star Wars projects, and then the tide changes. Phil Lord and Chris Miller thought they were making Solo: A Star Wars Story. James Mangold was attached to a Boba Fett movie. Projects are influenced by the tide.
And as Snyder points out, the success of the VERY R-rated Deadpool and Wolverine could eventually have an impact on the types of Star Wars stories that Lucasfilm allows to be told. When asked if we might ever see an R-rated Star Wars movie, Snyder said:
I don't know. It's an interesting question. You look at what happened with Deadpool, and maybe? I mean, it's hard to say.
But if a project like that were to work, it almost has to come from someone who loves, appreciates and respects Star Wars enough to turn it on its head. And I’m not sure that Star Wars fans want that. When The Acolyte veered into fascinating detours, vocal Star Wars enthusiasts took to social media to argue that this is NOT the kind of storytelling they want in a galaxy far, far away. But Snyder tells ReelBlend that he really only was interested in making a Star Wars movie if he could twist and bend the confines of the franchise, for that’s what the formula needs. As he explained:
My Star Wars movie would've just… it was the reason why I wanted to do it as sort of its own thing. A one-off universe. I felt like an R-rated Star Wars was a fetish concept that didn't really – it was an outlier, and didn't really belong, frankly, within the continuity of Star Wars. But I still felt like there would be, you know, for people that grew up on Star Wars and whose aesthetic evolved, there would still be a market for that universe.
Make sure to watch our full interview with Snyder on ReelBlend:
Want a sneak peek at what Zack Snyder’s Star Wars movie might have looked like? One need only to subscribe to Netflix, where the theatrical cuts of Rebel Moon parts one and two will now be joined by the director’s cuts, which promise Snyder’s complete vision of this epic story… and give you a hint of where he might have taken the Star Wars legacy, if given the chance.
