Zack Snyder’s new sci-fi epic Rebel Moon was originally pitched as a Star Wars movie before being retooled as an original property, which calls back to George Lucas’ creation of the Star Wars franchise itself in an interesting way. It’s in the spirit of Star Wars to homage a beloved franchise with enough minor changes to avoid a copyright infringement. Lucas first created Star Wars when he failed to secure the film rights to Flash Gordon. Just as Lucas made a Flash Gordon movie under a new name, Snyder is making a Star Wars movie under a new name.
Rebel Moon is set to be released on Netflix on December 22, but it’s been rattling around Snyder’s head for over a decade. According to Digital Spy, Rebel Moon began its development as a Star Wars movie that Snyder pitched to Lucasfilm. Snyder pitched to Lucasfilm sometime between the end of Lucas’ prequel trilogy in 2005 and Disney’s acquisition of the company in 2012, when there were no other Star Wars movies in active development. Snyder said, “My idea was just, give me the keys and I’ll take her for a spin.” The 300 director was ahead of the curve on the “Anthology” format that the Star Wars franchise would adopt when it was acquired by the Mouse House and started pumping out new movies annually.
Snyder planned to go back to Lucas’ original source of inspiration – the classic samurai films of Akira Kurosawa – with a spacebound reimagining of Seven Samurai. He didn’t want to use any existing characters or storylines in his Star Wars movie; he just wanted to make a standalone film set in a galaxy far, far away. A couple of years ago, Snyder confirmed he was retooling his Star Wars pitch as an original story: “I’ve been working on it, just away from the Star Wars universe, just on my own, just as a sci-fi thing... It’s still a sci-fi thing, it’s the same story. Now, I’m letting Star Wars be Star Wars. 11-year-old me still wants to make that.” It was easy enough to reimagine the film as an original story by changing the characters’ names and tweaking the worldbuilding.
George Lucas Originally Wanted To Make A Flash Gordon Movie
In his book Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, Dale Pollock wrote that Lucas tried to make a Flash Gordon movie in the 1970s, but he was unable to secure the film rights from producer Dino De Laurentiis. So, Lucas decided to create his own spacefaring saga about a plucky young hero rising up against the oppressive forces of an evil intergalactic dictator, and it became even bigger than Flash Gordon. Ironically, a Flash Gordon movie finally got made after Star Wars became the highest-grossing film ever made and every studio in Hollywood churned out a movie set in space in the hope of scoring their own Star Wars-like success.
Based on the official plot synopsis released by Netflix, Rebel Moon is maintaining Snyder’s original Star Wars premise to tell a Seven Samurai story in space. Rebel Moon takes place in a universe controlled by the crooked government of the Mother World. A moon called Veldt is under threat from the Mother World’s army, the Imperium, led by the villainous Regent Balisarius. Sofia Boutella stars as Kora, a former member of the Imperium seeking redemption for her past mistakes. She travels across the galaxy and assembles a team of elite warriors to prepare to make a stand against the bad guys before they return.
Star Wars has always borrowed from other stories. Not only is Lucas’ original 1977 masterpiece a loose remake of The Hidden Fortress; it also draws influence from fairy tales, mythology, the Arthurian legend, and Nazi propaganda. The Phantom Menace’s iconic podracing sequence was inspired by the chariot races in Ben-Hur. Anakin has been compared to Shakespearean tragic heroes like Hamlet and Othello. The unreliable narrators of The Last Jedi reference the conflicting eyewitness accounts of Rashomon. The Mandalorian borrows its formula of a grizzled warrior taking a vulnerable child under his wing from the fan-favorite Lone Wolf and Cub series. Star Wars even offered up its own interpretation of Seven Samurai in The Mandalorian episode “Chapter 4: Sanctuary.”
Snyder’s wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, told Empire magazine that Rebel Moon is “an accumulation of everything he’s done thus far.” It’ll be interesting to see Snyder’s vision of a galaxy far, far away, even if the movie isn’t set in the Star Wars universe as originally planned. Given how much meddling Disney has been doing with the official Star Wars movies, a filmmaker’s best bet at having creative control over their space opera is to rework their Star Wars idea as an original story. Snyder will have a lot more autonomy over Rebel Moon than he would’ve had over a proper Star Wars movie.