Update: The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Zack Snyder’s people and found that he is not working on a Star Wars film of any sort.
Vulture is reporting that Zack Snyder is making a Star Wars movie, just not Episode VII, VIII, or IX.
According to Vulture, he’ll be remaking Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai with Jedi, set sometime after Return of the Jedi.
It will be an as-yet-untitled Jedi epic loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai, with the ronin and katana being replaced by the Force-wielding knights and their iconic lightsabers.
The plausible elements of this news?
First, Disney said they’d be making Star Wars movies outside the numbered saga. They also said they’d be all over the place. It’s also rumoured that it is these outside the numbered saga films that Lawrence Kasdan is working on, not direct followups to Return of the Jedi. It’s also well-known that Kurosawa is a huge influence on Star Wars. I wrote about it at length in my column over at StarWars.Com, The Cinema Behind Star Wars. Zack Snyder is also a popular name to bandy about whenever a geek project is mentioned.
And it wouldn’t be the first time Seven Samurai had been adapted into the Star Wars universe. Or even the second time. It was the first Expanded Universe story in the Marvel Comics adaptations, featuring Han, Chewie, a crazy old Jedi Knight patterned after Don Quixote, and Jaxxon the Rabbit, among others. They also did it on The Clone Wars in the episode “Bounty Hunters.” It’s great material and Star Wars can do it in endless ways. Casting the Samurai as Jedi in the post-Return of the Jedi era sounds fascinating.
All of those parts of the story sound plausible. Awesome even.
But the part of this I find implausible is Vulture. Again, there is no source for any of this. None. Who did they talk to? Where did this come from? Is there an interview? They’re billing this as an exclusive but there is nothing in the article to indicate where they got this idea. They didn’t even point to “sources at Lucasfilm.”
It was just a very matter-of-fact “this is happening.”
We’ll see. It’s totally possible. They may have gotten it right. But bear in mind they could have just as easily made the whole thing up.
[source: Club Jade]
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