Star Wars may have taken a break from the box office since 2019, but Lucasfilm has been slowly cooking with a bunch of incoming movies—one of them being a prequel from Indiana Jones director James Mangold. While there hasn’t been any official reveals for his Dawn of the Jedi movie, he does confirm when the film will be set.
Talking to MovieWeb, Mangold shares, “The Star Wars movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known Star Wars movies takes place. It’s an area and a playground that I’ve always [wanted to explore] and that I was inspired by as a teenager. I’m not that interested in being handcuffed by so much lore at this point that it’s almost immovable, and you can’t please anybody.”
With the thousand-years gap, this would be the farthest a live-action property has went back in time in terms of the original canon. Before Dawn of the Jedi, there was The Acolyte, which took place around the High Republic era, roughly a hundred years before the events of The Phantom Menace.
While we don’t have specific story details for Dawn of the Jedi, Mangold has said in an old interview that his movie would deal with the first Jedi and the discovery of the Force. He told Empire, “It’s about the discovery of the Force… I told Kathy [Kennedy, head of Lucasfilm] I wanted to make a kind of Bible movie, a kind of Ten Commandments of Star Wars – kind of a Cecil B DeMille film about the arrival of the Force, and that’s what I’ve been pecking away at between press events. That’s the idea.”
It’s certainly a fascinating concept, and one that has barely been showcased in the live-action Star Wars media. Admittedly, there’s so much toxic scrutiny whenever a Star Wars thing comes out nowadays, but hopefully the obscurity of the timeline will make the haters back down.
But let’s face it, the moment they announce the lead is a POC or woman, this project is going to fuel months of grifter hate way before the movie releases.
Let’s just hope that Lucasfilm learned their lesson from the Sequel Trilogy.
Dawn of the Jedi is yet to receive a release date.
