James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi Is Repeating A Force Awakens Controversy
The blank slate is back.
One of the greatest joys of Star Wars is that there are hundreds of novels, comics, and games to be inspired by, meaning any creator — be they a filmmaker, an author, or just a fanfiction writer — is never bereft of ideas. However, that vast legacy can also be a creator’s biggest obstacle, as trying to create a story that fits seamlessly into an already complicated continuity is a challenging restriction.
An upcoming Star Wars movie is avoiding that problem by being almost entirely disconnected from the modern canon, and while its director considers that a blessing, is it actually the smartest move?
James Mangold is moving from Bob Dylan to outer space with Dawn of the Jedi.
James Mangold still has a ways to go before starting production on his Star Wars prequel movie, colloquially (but not officially) known as Dawn of the Jedi, but he’s already discussing it while promoting his current project, A Complete Unknown. In conversation with MovieWeb, he revealed his choice to set the film 25,000 years before the Skywalker Saga wasn’t just motivated by curiosity about how the Jedi came to be; it’s also a way to avoid dealing with existing canon.
“Part of the reason the Star Wars movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known Star Wars movies take place is because it’s an area and a playground that I’ve always [wanted to explore] and that I was inspired by as a teenager,” Mangold said, “but also 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.”
It’s not the first time a Star Wars movie has decided to go its own way. In 2014, Lucasfilm released a statement saying that while the then-upcoming sequel trilogy would cover events after Return of the Jedi, it wouldn’t pull from any Expanded Universe (later renamed Legends) content. In fact, those stories — everything except the six flagship movies and the animated series The Clone Wars — were rendered non-canon.
Ahsoka pulled its villain from the Legends continuity, but Dawn of the Jedi will try a different approach.
“These stories are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align,” the statement said. “In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi expanded universe."
That didn’t stop Legends from creeping into the modern canon anyway. Classic Legends villain Grand Admiral Thrawn was brought back for the animated series Rebels, and later made his live-action debut in Ahsoka. So just because the EU isn’t canon anymore, that doesn’t mean Mangold can’t pull from, say, the Dawn of the Jedi comics for his story.
His latest comments, however, strongly suggest he won’t. The blank slate method was controversial when the sequel trilogy tried it, and the results were mixed, to put it charitably. Mangold is a talented filmmaker, and the distant past might be a better place to try this approach, but we can only hope that wiping away the past to start anew pays off this time.
