A new Star Wars movie is on the way from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold, and it's going to be set tens of thousands of years back on the Star Wars timeline.
Why set it so far in the past? Well, it's because Mangold doesn't want his hands tied by Star Wars's formidable canon.
"The Star Wars movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known Star Wars movies takes place," he told MovieWeb. "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."
Mangold's movie will explore the origins of the Force. This isn't the first time he's explained his reasoning for going so far back. "When I mentioned to Kathy [Kennedy, Lucasfilm president] 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 said in 2023. "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."
There's no release date for Mangold's movie just yet. While you wait, check out our guide to all the upcoming Star Wars movies and shows for everything else the galaxy far, far away has in store.
