James Mangold’s Star Wars Jedi Movie Has Tapped an Andor Writer

Of the many Star Wars film ideas floating around right now, it’s one of the most intriguing: James Mangold’s plans to take us back tens of thousands of years before the films, before almost everything we’ve ever known about Star Wars, to explore the origins of the earliest wielders of the Force. And now it’s found a similarly intriguing Star Wars connection in its writer, for very different reasons.

The Hollywood Reporter has word that Mangold’s film has tapped House of Cards creator Beau Willimon to write the script for what is tentatively referred to as Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi. Mangold is expected to begin focusing on the film after the completion of his current project—A Complete Unknown, the musical Bob Dylan biopic with Dune’s Timothée Chalamet.

This is not Willimon’s first tangle with the galaxy far, far away, however. He wrote one of the most incredible arcs of the already incredible first season of Andor—the prison storyline in “Narkina 5”, “Nobody’s Listening!”, and “One Way Out”. A tense prison breakout of ordinary people put upon by the grips of fascism is obviously a very different kind of Star Wars to the theological ideas about the birth of the Jedi and the exploration of the Force a movie like Mangold’s aims to explore, but this is the kind of news that makes you stand up and be interested in just what Lucasfilm might be trying to go for as it re-aligns its Star Wars movie slate.

We’ll bring you more on James Mangold’s Star Wars movie, and all the other ones, as and when we learn it.

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