Josh Trank Talks ‘Boba Fett’ Film & The Creative Challenge Of Telling Stories In A Cinematic “Sandbox”

For the first time in five years (since 2015’s “Fantastic Four”), a film that Josh Trank was attached to will finally get released, with “Capone” arriving on VOD. But “Capone” is far from the only film that the director has developed since 2015. Unfortunately, the previous films, including a “Boba Fett” solo film, never came to fruition. But in a new interview with UPROXX, Trank does talk about some of those issues, including the creative struggles working within the “Star Wars” universe.

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When asked about specifics regarding his much-publicized time working with Lucasfilm on a “Star Wars” spin-off film focused on the bounty hunter, Boba Fett, Trank had to keep things cryptic due to NDA liability. But he did talk about the handcuffs that canon put on films that are attached to large storytelling universes. And in the case of the “Boba Fett” film, many fans are curious about what that movie would have explored, considering George Lucas’ ‘Attack of the Clones’ pretty much gave fans the mysterious bounty hunter’s backstory.

READ MORE: Josh Trank Says ‘Fantastic Four’ Drama Caused ‘Boba Fett’ Departure: “I Knew I Was Going To Be Fired If I Didn’t Quit”

“Legally, I can’t say anything, but the one thing that’s out there is just that the canon is the canon,” he explained. “The canon that they work with is not including the Dark Horse comics, or any of the books, novelizations, or anything from the video games and any of those plot lines. So, I mean, I think the way that a creative would look at that would be the same way they would look at playing in anybody else’s sandbox.”

Trank continued, “If you’re going to tell a story, you want to sort of distill all the elements of what exists around it into what matters for the story that you’re trying to tell. And I think with any one of those characters that exist in the ‘Star Wars’ universe or in the Marvel universe, or in the DC universe – or any giant, deeply storied, decades-old, century-old universe – you could take 5,000 different creatives and they’re all going to have a different idea of what story they want to tell. And I think that’s right in the world of comic book writers. They all get an opportunity to jump in and take a character from Marvel and create their book out of that character. So I think the best of what’s going on with ‘Star Wars’ would be something like that.”

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Sure, that doesn’t tell “Star Wars” fans much about what the “Boba Fett” film would have looked like, but it does give you an idea of the thought that has to go into any project being told in a cinematic universe. While Trank and any other filmmaker would love to have a clean slate to tell a badass Boba Fett story, there are restrictions and creative hurdles you have to overcome and work with. So, it appears that Trank had a creative idea for how to work with the canon set up by Lucas, while also trying to tell his own story about a “Star Wars” bounty hunter. Unfortunately, we just won’t ever know what it was going to be.