Boba Fett?! Boba Fett?! Where? Exactly Han. Exactly.
Boba was so close to getting his own movie. Possibly the most exciting Star Wars spin-off, the Boba Fett movie has been officially confirmed for months, with Logan director James Mangold at the helm. Sadly though, it turns out there’s only room for one Mandalorian story in the new Star Wars canon.
Journalist Erick Weber – brandishing the gravitas of a checked-blue-seal-rocking Twitter account – has posted a confirmation from Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy that the mooted Boba Fett spinoff movie is “100% dead.”
According to Weber’s post, the reason for the move is simple. The franchise has shifted its attentions to the Jon Favreau-penned live-action TV series, The Mandalorian; a project that obviously fulfills enough bounty hunter-related drama for one fandom. Of course, we might also deduce that the slightly underwhelming box office performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story left the Lucasfilm/Disney coalition a bit more cautious about making more spinoffs.
While a June report indicated that all the Star Wars spinoff efforts were to be put on hold, there were still rumblings that the Boba Fett film had escaped the Sarlacc pit of cancellation. Indeed, the project, which had experienced several starts and stops over the years in developmental hell, was a survivor, having originally started life with controversial Fantastic Four helmer Josh Trank.
Boba Fett’s ability to cling to life is no surprise, seeing as he’s one of the most popular characters in the annals of the Star Wars franchise, perhaps second only to Darth Vader himself; somethign that stems from his heralded introduction as an animated character in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special and as a mail-away action figure, hyping a stoic, extremely badass-looking mystery villain during the buildup years going into 1980 sequel The Empire Strikes Back. In that film, he rose to infamy by delivering Han Solo’s carbonite-covered body to Jabba the Hutt (and we won’t mention what happened to him in Return Of The Jedi, or the backstory that Attack Of The Clones gave him…).
Looks like it’s all down to The Madalorian to give us our Fett fix now. What is it with this guy and anticlimactic endings?