Early last year, amid the craziness of a world engulfed by a pandemic, we learned that Taika Waititi was officially on board to make a Star Wars movie for Lucasfilm/Disney (here) and it’s been pretty quiet ever since.
However, now Waititi himself is actually talking about his planned Star Wars movie.
Of course, the actor/writer/director is no stranger to Star Wars, having voiced IG-11 in The Mandalorian season 1.
“It’s still in the ‘EXT. SPACE’ stage,” Waititit says before adding: “But we’ve got a story. I’m really excited by it because it feels very me.”
While he has just finished his second big movie for Disney/Marvel with Thor: Love and Thunder (he also directed Thor: Ragnarok), this will be his first foray into telling a story in the galaxy far, far away, but he doesn’t seem too worried.
“I tend to go down that little sincerity alleyway in my films,” he says.
“I like to fool the viewer into thinking ‘ha it’s this’ and then [having them go], ‘Damn it, you made me feel something!'”
However, this is not the only iron Waititi has in the fire as he’s still developing his Flash Gordon movie which is now going to be live-action rather than animated as originally planned (here). During the press meeting for Jungle Cruise, Disney producer John Davis revealed that the movie will now go down the road of the classic 1980 movie starring Sam J Jones and will be a fully live-action outing: “Taika is writing it. It was a movie that was a huge influence on him growing up. It is one of his favorite movies. He initially said to me, ‘Let’s do it animated.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Then we got into it and started developing it and he said, ‘No, let’s do it live-action.’ I said, ‘Even better.'”
We’re also hearing rumours that DC/Warners, following on from James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, are looking to bring Waititi over from the Marvel stable to helm a DC movie. We’re not hearing anything concrete on this one but we’d not be surprised at all.
Personally, I love Waititi’s movies, with Jojo Rabbit being one of the best movies of the last ten years in my opinion and I feel that he would make a great director for Flash Gordon, especially having seen Thor: Ragnarok which is bright, funny and just the right side of too campy however, as much as I like Ragnarok (and I do, honestly), I felt that it was not at home in the MCU and sat awkwardly tonally with the other movies in the saga… and this concerns me with what he’s doing with Star Wars BUT I have said before that Star Wars could lend itself to romantic comedies, horrors stories… it can all be happening in that galaxy far, far away, so I’ll hold off being too worried until I start seeing and hearing more.
In the meantime, count me among the curiously excited.
Source: Wired, Collider and Giant Freakin Robot
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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