“To a New Jersey kid and his best friend, the franchise was more than just movies.”
Everyone has a love or hate relationship with Kevin Smith, but we all respect him. After breaking into the movie industry with his cult hit, Clerks, Kevin Smith has been a staple in the geek community has a director, comic/film writer, author, and comedian. I guess the news about Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm and the announcement of Episode VII in 2015 struck him hard as Star Wars as a special place in his heart. One of the characters from the Star Wars universe that is very near and dear to him is Boba Fett. His love for the bounty hunter with a few words has motivated him to put out a passionate plea to Disney to create an Star Wars film centralized around Boba Fett which is featured on Hollywood Reporter. The article talks about Smith and his childhood friend, Pete who like most kids that love Star Wars, created their own stories using action figures in their backyard. Some of the stories that they loved to create was for their favorite character, Boba Fett.
“If Disney wants to make another cool billion dollars like it did with The Avengers last summer, all it needs to do is make a Boba Fett time-travel flick. It would center on a character everyone digs and allow for a greatest hits of Star Wars while playing with an already-established timeline, a la Back to the Future. You could use every living (and dead) actor from the previous Star Wars films, no matter what their age — which means Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford can come and play as well. It’d be a dream come true for any Star Wars fan — particularly those of us who opted out of the boring-ass real world every summer for galaxies far, far away.”
“Not a summer goes by when I don’t think about Pete or our ongoing saga of Boba Fett lost in time. So when I heard about Disney’s $4 billion Lucasfilm acquisition, naturally I had a brief, one-sided conversation with my former best friend.
“We might finally get to see that Fett flick we always dreamed about, Pete,” I said aloud at my desk after I read the news.
So in a world where Disney needs to make back its investment, we may indeed see an all-Boba Fett film. And if the Force wills it, maybe it’ll even be about Boba Fett lost in the Star Wars universe time stream. But even if it became the highest-grossing film of all time, it’d still never be as good as Pete King’s version.”
Kevin Smith might be on to something here. While most of us have been campaigning for existing storylines in the Star Wars Expanded Universe like Legacy of the Force, not many of us have thought about creating films based on a character’s origins. Boba Fett would be a great example. As a character that existed in most of the Star Wars films, it would be interesting to revisit Boba Fetts point of view during that time and beyond. What did Boba do after the death of Jango Fett and his reappearance as a bounty hunter for the Galactic Empire? What happened to him after falling into the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi? I already know Boba’s adventures beyond ROTJ, but most people don’t. “Boba Fett Origins” might not work right now in Episode VII, but surly, there is a story there that can be made into a motion picture. I’m pretty sure there are millions of Star Wars fans that agree with Kevin Smith. We need a Boba Fett movie.
