James Mangold’s ‘Star Wars’ Is Set 25,000 Years Before the Other Movies: What’s Happening in That Era?

The "A Complete Unknown" director said he's excited to make a movie set in this period so he's not "handcuffed" to "Star Wars" lore.

A new production listing from the Film & Television Industry Alliance offers a tantalizing tidbit about a much-anticipated new “Star Wars” feature: namely, that James Mangold‘s mysterious film is set to begin shooting in London in December 2025. Whether that sticks will be determined. But the director, currently working the awards season gauntlet for his acclaimed Bob Dylan film “A Complete Unknown,” opened up to share with MovieWeb about why his adventure in the galaxy far, far away will be set eons earlier than any other “Star Wars” film, so as not to be “handcuffed” to “Star Wars” lore.

“To me, the really important aspects are the freedom to make something new,” Mangold said of the script he’s co-writing with “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon (who’s also contributed to “Andor”).

“The ‘Star Wars’ movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known ‘Star Wars’ movies take place,” said Mangold. “It’s an area and a playground that I’ve always [wanted to explore] and that I was inspired by as a teenager. I’m not that interested in being handcuffed by so much lore at this point that it’s almost immovable, and you can’t please anybody.”

So what’s happening in the “Star Wars” galaxy 25,000 years before the events of the saga we know and love?

Deadline outright said that Mangold’s film will be based on Dark Horse’s 2012-14 comic series “Dawn of the Jedi,” which shows the discovery of the Force and the birth of the Jedi. That seems extremely unlikely.

Yes, that series covered similar ground to what Mangold’s film hopes to achieve. But, as he stated above, Mangold has chosen this period because he has the freedom to tell his own story, unshackled to tons of lore affixed in moviegoers’ minds. The “Dawn of the Jedi” series has its fans — writer John Ostrander and penciler Jan Duursema have created some of the best “Star Wars” stories ever throughout their Dark Horse work in the 2000s and 2010s — but that’s a small niche within the broader fandom of “Star Wars” itself.

From everything he’s said, Mangold would want to create his own story. Especially considering that the the “Dawn of the Jedi” comic series, having been created before Disney’s takeover of the company, is considered non-canon by Lucasfilm (or part of its “Legends” branding). In early 2014, Disney and Lucasfilm announced the creation of a “Story Group,” and that all they produced after then would be part of a unified canon — everything produced before then would be called “Legends.”

But hat doesn’t mean elements of the “Dawn of the Jedi” series can’t make their way into the official canon established after the announcement of the new canon. Many “Legends” stories have bubbled up over the past few years into the stories told by Lucasfilm post-2014, if in slightly different forms. (As Ahsoka Tano herself once said on “Star Wars: Rebels,” “there’s always a bit of truth in legends.”)

The character of Grand Admiral Thrawn has emerged in the timeline of “The Mandalorian” to wage war against the New Republic and revive the Empire just like he did in Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire” and subsequent “Star Wars” novels in the 1990s. But needless to say, the story that’s been told in “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka” so far has been startlingly different. Why just adapt a story told 30 years ago? Lucasfilm is really not supposed to give us something new at all?

In fact, for Mangold’s film, it’s clear that Lucasfilm has already made a few changes within the official canon that differ from the “Dawn of the Jedi” comic series. Much of the comic was set on the planet Tython, where, in that lore, the Jedi Order was born. That was already changed by “The Last Jedi,” where Luke Skywalker was hiding out on the planet Ach-To, where he said in the film that that was the location of the first Jedi Temple. There’s even a mosaic there that the supplementary books for “The Last Jedi” said depicted the Prime Jedi, as in the first Jedi to ever exist. That seems like that, which is actually in a “Star Wars” film and part of the new canon steered by the Story Group, would have a much greater influence on Mangold’s film than a comic series that ran for 15 issues over a decade ago.

There are all kinds of “early Star Wars” lore nuggets from the old “Legends” canon, though. The planet Coruscant, eventually the city-planet that’s the capital of the Republic (and kind of the galaxy at large), was once a volcano world where two warring factions, the Taungs and the Battalions of Zhell, did battle. “Legends” had it that the Taungs were the progenitors of the Mandalorians. There were pre-Republic empires that ruled the galaxy with brutality, such as that of Xim the Despot, who actually has re-entered the canon because a crystal masthead of Xim’s skull appears on the Paul Bettany character’s ship in “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” The Hutts had huge influence at this time — one named Kossak the Hutt actually overthrew Xim’s empire. And mysterious species held sway, such as the Rakata, who figured deeply in the “Knights of the Old Republic” video game.

Could any of these appear in Mangold’s film in at least Easter Egg form the way they have in other canon projects since 2014? Sure. Should we expect any of them to be a central focus instead of the story that Mangold himself wants to tell? Absolutely not.

“Star Trek” did something similar in recent years, along the lines of Mangold wanting to set his film in a time period where he won’t be “handcuffed” by lore. “Trek” set the last three seasons of “Discovery” and its upcoming “Starfleet Academy” show hundreds of years beyond the last explored time period in “Trek” canon. At this time, the 32nd Century, it’s basically an entirely new galaxy to explore. Or as franchise overlord Alex Kurtzman told IndieWire, it was “fresh snow” for their writers.

Fans love to get lost in the minutiae of “lore.” At its best, being obsessed with lore means deepening your appreciation of a fictional universe. At its worst, it’s about prioritizing Wiki pages over, you know, actual storytelling. Lore should always be in service to the storytelling, first and foremost, not an end unto itself. And if the lore needs to change to accommodate a powerful story that needs to be told, there are usually ways to make that happen with an in-universe explanation.

The idea that all the old “Star Wars Legends” stories are oral histories passed on is a powerful one because it allows for the “canon” version to be similar… but distinctly different. Like a galactic game of telephone got it slightly wrong the first time. (Hey, look how much misinformation we see on social media just in our own reality every day.)

Fans being obsessed with lore to an unhealthy degree — as seen in the backlashes against “The Last Jedi” and “The Acolyte” — has arguably stymied the development of new “Star Wars” movies for years. Hopefully, Mangold will have the freedom to tell the story he wants to tell, that excites him as a filmmaker and an artist, the one he says inspired him to think about even as a teenager. That’s passion, and that’s what fuels a great story. The lore can come later, and can fit that story as it needs to.