Draft:Untitled James Mangold Star Wars film

The film is set centuries before the main Star Wars films during the "Dawn of the Jedi" era and explores the origins of the first Jedi and the Force.^[1]

In February 2018, Lucasfilm announced that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss would write and produce a new series of Star Wars films that would be separate from the main "Skywalker Saga" film series as well as a planned new film trilogy from Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) director Rian Johnson. Benioff and Weiss were expected to begin work on the new Star Wars films after completing the final season of their series Game of Thrones.^[2] The pair wanted to explore the origins of the Jedi Order and considered the title The First Jedi.^[3][4] Creative differences between them and Lucasfilm emerged during meetings in mid-2018.^[3] In April 2019, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said their would be no new Star Wars films released for several years after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), the last of the Skywalker Saga films, as the company was taking their time to plan the next decade of storytelling for the franchise. She said Benioff, Weiss, and Johnson were working together to plan their projects, and the intention was for the new films to be set in different parts of the Star Wars timeline from the Skywalker Saga.^[5]

Disney CEO Bob Iger said in May 2019 that the next Star Wars film would be directed by Benioff and Weiss, and released in 2022; Disney felt three years was the right amount of time to prepare for the next film.^[6] At the same time, Benioff and Weiss were courting multiple studio offers for overall film and television deals,^[7] and they signed an exclusive deal with Netflix in August. The pair were initially expected to continue working on their Star Wars films,^[8] and Netflix executives were aware of this commitment when the deal was signed. However, Netflix wanted Benioff and Weiss to prioritize developing new projects for them, and the pair officially parted-ways with Lucasfilm in October. They said this was because they could not do justice to both their Star Wars and Netflix projects.^[9] In September 2023, David S. Goyer said he had written a scriptment for a Jedi origins film set 25,000 years before the Skywalker Saga, but it was not produced due to "behind-the-scenes stuff" at Lucasfilm.^[10] In January 2024, Benioff and Weiss said they left their Star Wars deal because Lucasfilm did not want to tell their first Jedi story.^[4]

At Star Wars Celebration London in April 2023, Lucasfilm announced that James Mangold—who directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) for the studio—would write and direct a Star Wars film set in the "Dawn of the Jedi" era. He said it would explore the origins of the Force and the first Jedi, and had pitched it to Kennedy as being akin to the epic religious films Ben-Hur (1959) and The Ten Commandments (1956).^[1] Mangold had begun writing the script. He was working on a planned Swamp Thing film for the DC Universe (DCU) franchise at the same time, and was unsure which project would move forward first following his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.^[11] That November, Dave Filoni revealed that he was now chief creative officer at Lucasfilm, after serving as executive producer on various Star Wars television series, and would be directly involved in the planning of future films and series.^[12] Beau Willimon, a writer on the Star Wars television series Andor, was hired to co-write the screenplay with Mangold in April 2024. The film, which was being referred to by the working title Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi, was expected to be the focus for Mangold following his work on A Complete Unknown.^[13]