So About That Guillermo del Toro Star Wars Movie: the Ball’s in Lucasfilm’s Court Now

Few things in this world get me as excited as the prospect of a brand new Star Wars movie.

Maybe less so these days, since Lucasfilm and Disney have promised a brand new Star Wars movie every year, but my excitement found new heights today as I found out that Guillermo del Toro had already shared some of his ideas with Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy and John Knoll.

This comes by way of an interview between the director and Collider, where del Toro was very, very careful about his words. He explained, before diving into the question about whether he would want to direct a Star Wars feature:

In 2006, Mike Fleming at Deadline wrote an article that said ‘Guillermo del Toro is busy until 2012’ and he published 20 things I was maybe doing. Since then I haven’t been able to live down that. Every time I say ‘good morning’ somebody says ‘Guillermo is doing Good Morning!’, so I will not comment on this… I look like a kook. Neil Gaiman once said, ‘I would like to write ‘Doctor Strange’ with Guillermo’ then all of a sudden in IMDb I had ‘Doctor Strange’ [listed].

And of course, the heart of the matter comes after the caveats above: “Saying all that caveat, I will say there’s some characters that are great, and I have talked to Kathleen Kennedy and John Knoll about ideas.”

To be extra clear, del Toro’s idea for a Star Wars movie has been floating around since 2015, as in an interview with Yahoo! Movies, he said:

I would do the sort of Godfather saga that Jabba the Hutt had to go through to gain control. One, because it’s the character that looks the most like me, and I like him. I love the idea of a Hutt type of mafia, a very complex coup. I just love the character.

Of course, very wary of the rumors that can pop up once he mentions anything, he prefaced that thought with, “This is not real, this is me as a fat geek just geeking out and talking about it.”

Whether del Toro will get to see those ideas come to life is still very, very much up in the air, and as the headline says, the ball really is in Lucasfilm’s court. It’s no secret though that del Toro is very much a busy man, and he’s had his hands on a vast multitude of projects in the past two years alone. Between his stop-motion feature Pinnochio and the Cold War-era The Shape of Water, his plate’s pretty full. Then again, so is the Star Wars release schedule, so who’s to say they won’t already be lining up directors and creators for 2018 and beyond?

Frankly, I’m incredibly excited about the idea of a del Toro Star Wars in so many different ways, and I know that I’m not alone in that. That may explain some of the newsy bits going around about him possibly directing a Star Wars feature, but I’m trying to also be more aware of the fact that he seems to be more than a bit tired of people running with quotes of his because they want to see him make movies within their favorite franchises. I think, though, if there’s one bit of information that can be gleaned from this exchange with Collider, it’s that del Toro has passed the ball back to Lucasfilm, and it’s up to them to figure out if they want to set him up or not.

Gosh, can this happen somehow?

(via IndieWire, image: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

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