Zack Snyder Has Reworked His Kurosawa-Inspired ‘Star Wars’ Pitch Into a Non-‘Star Wars’ Idea
Posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2021 by Ben Pearson



A year after Disney purchased Lucasfilm and before we knew that J.J. Abrams would direct Star Wars: Episode VII, a report came out saying that director Zack Snyder (Justice League, Army of the Dead) was developing a Star Wars film that was inspired by Akira Kurosawa movies like Seven Samurai.

Snyder’s representatives denied the report at the time, but in a new interview, Snyder confirms that plans were being made for it back then and explained that it has since been reworked into a different, non-Star Wars-related idea that audiences may see one day.

In its initial stages, this Zack Snyder Star Wars movie would have not been part of the Skywalker saga. Instead, it would have been set in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi and told the story of a group of Jedi warriors going on a mission.

On the most recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Snyder revealed that even though the project never ended up getting made at Lucasfilm, it’s not completely dead yet. “Yeah, we talked about it, but it never…I’ve been working on it, just away from the Star Wars universe, just on my own as a sci-fi thing,” he said. “It’s still a sci-fi thing, it’s the same story, it’s just kind of – let Star Wars be Star Wars. And the 11-year-old me still wants to make that. Now I just know how to, so maybe we’ll see that someday.”

When asked if his original pitch involved pre-established characters from the Star Wars mythology, he said it did not. “My idea was just: give me the keys and I’ll take her for a spin…it was that sort of middle Star Wars time, after they had done the prequels and before the sale. I was just like, ‘You know what? I can fix that,'” he said.

Snyder, of course, has a history of jumping into pre-existing universes on film, whether it was with his 2009 Watchmen adaptation, his remake of Dawn of the Dead, or his divisive DC superhero movies. I’m very curious about the alternate history scenario of what Lucasfilm might look and feel like right now if this project had been able to come to fruition. If a Seven Samurai-inspired movie came out around 2015 or 2016, The Mandalorian probably would not exist – at least in the same form. Does that mean that the StageCraft tech would also not exist, or would Jon Favreau have cooked that up with another team at a different company instead? Fascinating stuff to think about…
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