You need a very high IQ to understand Star Wars. Well, not really, but you need a lot of time on your hands. As fun as it is to immerse yourself in the Star Wars timeline, keeping up with all the past Star Wars movies, TV series, novels, and videogames isn’t a task for the faint of heart. This is why James Mangold, who will be directing one of the new movies, is taking a unique approach in terms of balancing all the lore.
I’ve talked to [Lucasfilm] before and even worked a bit before on other projects,” Mangold said in an interview with i09 (via Gizmodo). “And I’m always interested in what’s going on there and have friends who work on other Star Wars projects. But I understood that much of what they were doing was kind of continuing the saga forward.”
“So 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 added.
“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”
If you think about it, it makes sense that in a new Star Wars movie about balancing the Force, Mangold doesn’t want to balance all the lore. But in the meantime, he’s dipped his toes into directing another one of Lucasfilms’ best movie franchises: Indiana Jones. So, in that spirit, check out our guide to the Indiana Jones 5 release date and our Indiana Jones 5 review.