Star Wars: How Close Did We Come to Josh Trank’s Boba Fett Movie?

It’s no secret that Disney wants to make a Boba Fett solo movie to add to their expanding universe of Star Wars Anthology films. For years, whenever the possibility of a Star Wars spinoff came up, the first name mentioned was Boba Fett, thanks to fans’ unending fascination with the badass-looking bounty hunter who never actually got around to doing anything of note in The Empire Strikes Back before croaking unceremoniously in Return of The Jedi and getting a dopey origin story foisted on him in Attack of The Clones. But Boba Fett has mystique by the sandcrawler-load, and that’s all that counts.

Names like Joe Johnston and Lawrence Kasdan had long been whispered in association with a Boba Fett movie, and at one point, Disney was ready to actually get to work on it. In fact, just a few years ago, Boba Fett was intended to be the second Star Wars Anthology movie after Rogue One. The director? Josh Trank, who had made his name on Chronicle, and was getting set to make a big summer blockbuster splash with 2015’s Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox. 

The plan was to officially unveil Mr. Trank as the director of Star Wars Anthology: Boba Fett (or Boba Fett: A Star Wars Story, or whatever it was going to be called) at Star Wars Celebration in April 2015, the same event where we first heard the title Rogue One. The problem was that Mr. Trank was deep into post-production and last minute edits on the deeply troubled Fantastic Four production. As a result, Mr. Trank never appeared at the event, and there were reports that he was specifically asked by Disney executives not to attend. Note that despite those reports, Mr. Trank and Lucasfilm issued a joint statement indicating that he had left the mystery Star Wars project on his own terms, and that the parting was an amicable one.

While the words “Boba Fett” never appeared in that statement, that was definitely what was in the cards. And in a different universe, fans who attended Star Wars Celebration 2015 would have seen not one, but two teasers, Rogue One…and Boba Fett. The news of the mysterious unseen Boba Fett teaser reel comes from Entertainment Weekly, and given the abrupt timing of Mr. Trank’s departure, it makes perfect sense that Lucasfilm was ready to give Boba Fett the same kind of red carpet rollout that they gave the less familiar Rogue One at the event. The initial Rogue One teaser they unveiled was little more than a proof-of-concept, and not actual footage from the film, so Boba Fett would have been something similar, but it’s still worth noting that this is out there somewhere.

Of course, it wasn’t to be, and as a result, they moves ahead with Solo: A Star Wars Story instead. There are plenty of potential dates on the Star Wars movie calendar, although the only one tied to a project after Solo is the still untitled Episode IX in 2019. 

“There are [possible movies] that we have been talking a lot about,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Entertainment Weekly. Well, it seems they already did a lot of “talking” about Boba Fett. Don’t be surprised if we hear his name again sooner than you think. 

After Star Wars Celebration 2017, Kennedy gave an update on the status of future films to Spanish outlet eCartelera (via Heroic Hollywood), saying that Lucasfilm would begin planning for Star Wars movies past 2020 after doing a reading of the script for Episode IX. 

“To be honest, we are beginning to talk about [the spin-offs] right now,” Kennedy said. “We have four or five weeks immersed in the film Han Solo and we are about to read the script of Colin Trevorrow’s Episode IX, so we have a lot of work at the moment. In the next six or eight months we will have some meetings about the stories that we will develop here.”

A Boba Fett movie could very well be in Lucasfilm’s plans through 2020 and beyond. We’ll certainly hear much more about it in the next few months.