During last April's Star Wars Celebration in London, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold confirmed plans to head into a Galaxy Far, Far Away to tell the story of the First Jedi.
While it's been revealed that this Star Wars movie will be set roughly 25,000 years before the events of The Phantom Menace, few updates have been shared since. That's likely because the Logan director is currently busy shooting his Bob Dylan biopic.
Talking to SFX (via SFFGazette.com), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and The Acolyte producer Simon Emanuel potentially revealed a new title for a movie we've been referring to as Dawn of the Jedi.
"James Mangold's Jedi Prime is set thousands and thousands of years before [the original trilogy]," he said, "and I'm really excited to see what happens there."
Jedi Prime?
Not only is that a pretty cool name, but it may have major implications for the movie itself. The Prime Jedi first appeared in the form of a mosaic in 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The image was created by concept artist Seth Engstrom and inspired by the Taoist iconography of yin and yang, the balance between dualities.
All we know is that the Prime Jedi was the first Jedi to use the Force and founded the Jedi Order on Ahch-To. This is the character Mangold will focus on and is someone Lucasfilm has seemingly wanted to reveal more about for a while now (originally, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were attached to a trilogy about the Galaxy's First Jedi).
Last year, Mangold explained what drew him to tell a story set thousands of years before any other Star Wars movie or TV show.
"When I talked to some of the Star Wars clerics that keep track of all of these timelines, I was like 'So when would this happen.' And they were like '25,000 years before Episode I,' and I was like 'Oh, I was looking for some distance, but that’s distance.' I’ll do it, I might find Charlton Heston in an abandoned subway station but I’ll do it."
"The reality for me is that that feeling of space, no pun intended, was something that I felt was really important not to get away from fan service or the intricacies of what George had set up and dreamed of," he continued, "but to just have the space to tell a story and not be instantly encumbered with the bases you have to hit."
"Which, honestly, there’s no way to explain it to folks other than to say it’s like that game we played as kids, 'Twister.' At a certain point, you are in a tangle, because you’re just trying to find ways to tell a story with so many constraints that you can."
Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi doesn't have a confirmed release date, though we don't anticipate seeing it in theaters until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest.