X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn has some ideas for another popular franchise.
The filmmaker would be interested in rebooting the original Star Wars films with a fresh set of actors playing Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones).
“For me, doing a Star Wars movie is to play with the characters that I loved,” he said on a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “If they said to me, do you want to reboot Star Wars and actually have Luke Skywalker, Solo and Vader and do your version of it? Everyone would say you’re an idiot to try, but that would excite me. … Why are the characters so hallowed that from 1977 that you can’t re-do it for a new audience?”
He explained that Star Wars is the Skywalker family, and he feels like Lucasfilm and Disney have sort of strayed from that original group of people, and that’s where he thinks they’ve gone wrong. He shared that, to him, the TV shows are still good, but the franchise is missing an epic new film.
“That’s what I would do,” he said. “Everyone is going to go batshit crazy, but let’s bring it on. If you want a new generation, make the movie for them. The old generation, hopefully, you make it well enough that they go, ‘Oh, OK, I’m enjoying it.’”
But Vaughn likely won’t be getting an opportunity anytime soon to remake the original films, as Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair last year that Lucasfilm is focused on expanding George Lucas’ universe beyond the Skywalker saga and is not planning to tell new stories with new actors playing the iconic characters. Her comments came after a negative reception to Solo: A Star Wars Story.
“We also can’t go do something with Luke Skywalker that isn’t Mark Hamill,” she said in the interview. “We’re not going to suddenly go try to do that.”
Up next for Vaughn, however, isn’t a new Star Wars film. It’s ensemble pic Argylle, starring Dua Lipa, Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, John Cena, Ariana DeBose and Samuel L. Jackson.
The thriller follows Cavill’s Argylle, a fictional super spy created by writer Elly Conway (Howard), whose life is turned upside down when her new book hits a little too close to the real life of actual spies who hunt her down when they read it.
Aryglle hits theaters Feb. 2, 2024.
Carly Thomas contributed to this report.