Director and writer Joss Whedon wants to direct a Star Wars movie. It was less than a year ago that Whedon seemed set on avoiding big budget blockbuster work, telling an audience at the Oxford Union, “I’ve gone off the reservation for a while.”
“That was an enormous gift they gave me,” Whedon said of his relationship with Marvel. “They handed me several hundreds of millions of dollars and said ‘do what you do,’ which is very rare and I was very lucky. At the same time, it’s important for me not to just to have my own thing and do something smaller, but also to create a new challenge for myself.”
That sound you’re hearing is the Disney helicopter fleet scouring the countryside with an army of lawyers and producers, reams of contract paperwork in-hand.
To be fair, Whedon also told Collider about his openness to doing both a Catwoman film and/or a James Bond movie, so his newfound enthusiasm could be more about returning to franchise filmmaking more than it is a particularly active desire to take a whack at A Star Wars Story. But the combination of Whedon and the non- Episode Star Wars movies is too tantalizing to leave unexplored.
Of course, any theoretical Whedon Star Wars movie would have to wait until 2020 at least, since the next few years are taken up with Rogue One, Star Wars: Episode 8, the untitled Han Solo movie and Star Wars: Episode IX in 2019. In the meantime, Whedon will be working on his new movie; what he describes as “a historical fiction slash horror movie about a time when the world was going insane, World War II.”
