Joss Whedon On The Star Wars Spinoff Movies And The Perils Of Nostalgia

Would he direct a Boba Fett movie if asked?

By Rudie Obias | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

JossWhen The Avengers hit theaters last summer, its success surprised pretty much everybody. The Marvel movie was the culmination of five years of world building after the release of the first Iron Man movie in 2008. The Avengers quickly became the third highest-grossing film of all time with a $1.5 billion worldwide box office. Whedon now has a hand in every Marvel movie for the foreseeable future. Needless to say, he can do anything he wants in Hollywood, but one of those things will not be a Star Wars movie.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the geek icon talked about the dangers of making too many movies based on existing geek properties (even Marvel ones). While Whedon’s next film is The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the 49-year-old director is reluctant to take on another big franchise. Whedon says:

There’s probably a dozen [properties I’d like to play with]. It’s very important I don’t do that. It’s very important that we start creating new content again. We can only build on nostalgia so much before we have nothing left to build on. Before we’re rebooting Spider-Man — again. It’s dangerous to the culture, and it’s boring to me. I squeezed in between my Avengers movies a 400-year-old play (Much Ado About Nothing). So I really need to create some new worlds.

But when the interviewer responded with, “So if Disney said, ‘Here’s the Boba Fett movie,’ you’d say no?” After some consideration and after being painted into a corner with the question, Whedon answered with a very sincere comment. “I can’t say for sure, because that’s a tasty morsel. But right now my heart doesn’t go that way,” said Whedon.

I believe Joss Whedon when he says he doesn’t want to do another big franchise movie after The Avengers, but who could pass up the opportunity to direct a Star Wars movie? It seems like Joss doesn’t need to direct a Star Wars movie. It would be the other way around, with Disney needing Joss to direct the hypothetical movie instead. After the successful premiere of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. this week, it seems like Joss has even more power in Hollywood, but Star Wars doesn’t sound like it’s in the cards for the director.

That said, we should probably wait until The Avengers: Age of Ultron before we get carried away with what Whedon will do next. The sequel film will not be in theaters for another year and a half, so it’s probably too soon to get excited for his next project after that. Let’s just wait until we see The Avengers: Age of Ultron in theaters in 2015 first.

If anyone is going to direct a Boba Fett movie, it should really be Joe Johnston. He was one of the designers of the iconic Star Wars bounty hunter and has been rumored to be attached to a stand-alone spinoff movie for so long. It would seem almost insulting if Johnston didn’t get a chance to direct a Boba Fett movie. He would definitely be up for the task.

Perhaps we’re missing the forest for the trees here, but it seems like Whedon might be right about building off nostalgia. At the moment, we’re in the middle of a new Spider-Man franchise that was rebooted only five years after the previous Spider-Man film in 2007. We’re also about to see Batman rebooted with Man of Steel: Superman Vs. Batman, only three years after The Dark Knight Rises came out. Maybe we should let Whedon create those new worlds for everyone to enjoy instead.

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