Josh Trank Confirms His ‘Star Wars’ Movie Would Have Starred Boba Fett
Long before Star Wars: The Force Awakens even had an official subtitle, Josh Trank was already working on what was expected to become one of the first Star Wars spinoff films from Disney. The announcement revealing the news included glowing quotes from Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy about Trank, then a hot Hollywood commodity after directing Chronicle and the helming the then-upcoming Fantastic Four reboot. “We're thrilled to welcome Josh into the family,” Kennedy raved. “He is such an incredible talent and has a great imagination and sense of innovation. That makes him perfectly suited to Star Wars.”
Or maybe not. Trank quit his Star Wars movie before it ever got off the ground — before the film’s subject was even officially announced. But a new, epic profile of Trank and his bumpy career at Polygon confirms the rumors that swirled at the time: Trank’s movie would have focused on beloved Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett.
The Polygon profile tells the fuller story:
At the time, Trank rented a house in Benedict Canyon just a few blocks from where George Lucas lived with his editor and wife Marcia Lucas when he wrote the first draft of Star Wars. With a few days to mull over [Lucasfilm consultant Simon] Kinberg’s offer, Trank walked up to the Lucas house and basked in its glow. He called it one of the most surreal moments of his life. “The visions that I had in that moment were just out of this world,” he said. He walked back to his home with a three-act pitch for a Boba Fett movie.
Less than a year after he was announced for the project in June of 2014, Trank was gone from Lucasfilm. Trank told Polygon he was “going to be fired if [he] didn’t quit” after “whispers of turmoil” on the set of Fantastic Four spooked Kennedy and Lucasfilm.
Polygon’s piece doesn’t have any additional details of the story that Trank wanted to tell about Boba Fett, but it’s full of other fascinating details about Trank’s life and career from his early days, to how he broke through in Hollywood making viral videos (some about Star Wars, ironically), and then the process of making Chronicle and his disastrous Fantastic Four, including beat-by-beat breakdowns of how the theatrical cut of the film got as bad as it was. It’s a piece literally years in the making, and it’s quite a read.
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