Before Joe Johnston became a filmmaker in his own right, he spent years learning the tricks of the trade by working under George Lucas on the director’s celebrated early projects. As a concept artist and effects technician, Johnston worked on the original “Star Wars” trilogy and later parlayed those skills into an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for “Raiders Of The Lost Ark” directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Lucas. It has been over a decade since Johnson last collaborated on a Lucas-related project — he co-directed “The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Spring Break Adventure” back in 1999 — but it looks like he’s been trying to get something the fanboys would love off the ground at LucasFilm.
“You know if he wants to see it, I would show it to him,” Johnston told ScreenRant about whether or not Lucas has yet to see “Captain America” before dropping this little nugget, “I’m trying to get George to make a feature based on Boba Fett.”
The popularity of the villainous bounty hunter, whose look Johnston helped create, has always been notable for just how much of a following the character developed after brief appearances in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” Of course, the character returned in “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones,” in which he was fleshed out a little more and given a (pretty clunky) back-story explaining his path as well as some daddy issues that arose during his youth, after he witnessed Mace Windu killing his father. Anyway, for the cash-hungry Lucas, never too busy to serve another mediocre plate from the Star Wars universe, we’re surprised a Boba Fett feature hasn’t happened sooner and we could certainly see it being a possibility.
“I would like to, it would be a lot of fun,” Johnston said about directing the film if it should ever come to pass and while his track record may be a bit of a mess, his knowledge and hands on experience with “Star Wars” make him better suited than anybody to take on the job.
And while this does sound like a potentially cool idea, this is something we would have been excited about maybe 20-odd years ago. But seeing how far the “Star Wars” universe has been watered down and wrung out for cash from fans who keep living on the nostalgia from something they saw when they were nine years old, we just don’t trust that any Boba Fett movie now wouldn’t just be another ludicrously staged space soap opera. So chalk it up as a pipe dream for now. Meanwhile, you can see Johnston flex his directing muscles this weekend when “Captain America: The First Avenger” hits theaters this Friday.