Everybody knows that Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is the latest movie to draw its inspirations from Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, and as much as Netflix doesn’t want to admit it, everybody also knows the blockbuster sci-fi epic began life as a Star Wars spin-off.
It was a decade ago that the orchestrator of the DCU’s formative years held talks with Lucasfilm about potentially venturing to a galaxy far, far away, but when the project ended up getting put on the back-burner it didn’t exactly die. Instead, Snyder nurtured the idea, and his exclusive development deal with Netflix proved to be the perfect storm of circumstances to bring it to life.
Subscribers are even getting two intergalactic epics out of the equation, and in an interview with Empire, the filmmaker explained why Rebel Moon would never have worked being shoehorned or box into the established canon of Lucasfilm’s golden goose.
“It was Seven Samurai in space. And a Star Wars movie was my original concept for it. The sale had just happened. There was that window where, you know, who knows what’s possible? I was like, ‘I don’t want any of your characters. I don’t want to do anything with any known characters, I just want to do my own thing on the side.’ And originally I was like, ‘It should be rated R!’ That was almost a non-starter. I knew it was a big ask, to be honest. But the deeper I got into it, I realized it was probably never going to be what I wanted.”
With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny bombing and the next Star Wars movie years away, Lucasfilm’s loss could well prove to be Netflix’s gain, because it’s hard to predict any other outcome than Rebel Moon ending up as one of the streaming service’s most-watched in-house exclusives ever when it premieres this December.
