Matthew Vaughn Explains Where Disney Went Wrong With Star Wars, Says Full Reboot Would Excite Him
X-Men: First Class and Kinsgman director Matthew Vaughn recently shared where he thinks Disney went wrong with their Star Wars films, and also claimed he would be excited about directing a complete reboot of Lucas’ original film trilogy.
Speaking with Josh Horowitz while promoting his upcoming Argylle film, Vaughn was asked, “Would you ever do Star Wars? Would that be tough to say no to?”
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Vaughn responded, “Yeah. Now, not so much.” Horowitz would then interjected, “It’s been tainted a little bit…”
Vaughn replied, “It’s not been tainted. And I’m not going to go there. I would say for me doing a Star Wars movie is to play with the characters that I loved. So if they said to me, ‘We’ll reboot. Do you want to reboot Star Wars and actually have Luke Skywalker, Solo, and Vader and you do your version of it?’ Everyone would say you’re an idiot to try, but that would excite me.”
When Horowitz asserted Vaughn has a death wish, Vaughn countered, “But that’s fun. Why not? Bond. Do you mind Bond? You know you asked me who’s going to play the next Wolverine.”
“Why are these characters so hallowed that from ’77 you can’t redo it for a new audience. And that’s the story,” he said.
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From there Vaughn detailed where Disney went wrong with Star Wars, “Star Wars is the Skywalker family. And that’s where I think they’ve gone wrong ’cause they’ve forgot that.”
He added, “They’ve done brilliantly in the TV, but it needs an epic, new film. And that’s what I would do. I would go, right. Everyone’s going to go batshit crazy, but let’s bring it on. Because if you want a new generation make the movie for them. The old generation can hopefully make it well enough that they go, ‘Okay, I’m enjoying it.'”
Ironically, The Walt Disney Company attempted to do something similar with The Force Awakens. While not doing a hard reboot, the company did do a soft reboot in an attempt to garner a new generation of fans.
They replaced Luke Skywalker with Rey. They replaced Han Solo with Finn and Poe Dameron, and they replaced Princess Leia and Darth Vader with Rey and Kylo Ren. They even replaced R2-D2 with BB-8.
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As for the idea that the Star Wars films are about the Skywalker family, creator George Lucas agrees.
He explained to Charlie Rose back in 2015, “Now, there were two things that got abused with Star Wars and still being abused. 1. When Star Wars came out everybody said, ‘Oh it’s a silly movie. It’s just a bunch of space battles and stuff. It’s not real. There’s nothing behind it.’ I said, ‘Well, there is stuff behind it. It’s not just a space battle. There’s more to it than that. It’s much more complicated than that.’ But nobody would listen. So they just said, ‘Well, it’s simple and we like the spaceships. We like the stuff.’ So they said, ‘Fine.’ So the spaceships and that part of the science fantasy, whatever, got terribly abused. And, of course, everybody went out and made spaceship movies and they were all horrible. And they all lost tons of money.”
“And you say, ‘Well, there’s more to it than that. You can’t just go out and do spaceships,” he said.
Later in the interview while discussing The Force Awakens, Lucas stated, “One of the issues was the first three movies had all kinds of issues. They looked at the stories and they said we want to make something for the fans. So I said all I wanted to do was tell a story of what happened. You know, it started here and went there. That’s all about generations and it’s about, you know, the issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers. It’s a family soap opera, I mean ultimately.”
He elaborated, “We call it space opera, but people don’t realize it’s a soap opera and it’s all about family problems and that kind [of stuff]. It’s not about spaceships.”
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While Vaughn’s idea about completely rebooting the series is a hard sell, there might be an opportunity to continue to explore the lives of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia following the events of Return of the Jedi.
If The Walt Disney Company was interested in continuing with George’s vision of exploring the family dynamics of the Skywalkers, he could easily draw from the numerous Expanded Universe novels and comic books that feature Mara Jade, Ben Skywalker, Kol Skywalker, Cade Skywalker, Jaina Solo, Jacen Solo, and others.
The biggest road blocks with this course are The Walt Disney Company’s pride and feminist agenda.
What do you make of Vaughn’s comments?
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