UPDATE, 3:20 pm ET: Now, according to Hollywood Reporter, Snyder’s reps are denying the report.
Snyder’s spokesperson says: “While he is super flattered because he is a huge fan, Zack is not involved in any way with the new Star Wars. He is currently in post on his two films, Man of Steel and 300: Battle of Artemisia.”
So no Star Wars for Snyder, let alone a Seven Samurai Star Wars. That’s good to hear, though I want that five minutes of my life back. But hey, here’s a corgi puppy playing with a stuffed monkey.
Phew, for a second there, I felt like I had gone five minutes without hearing about Star Wars or Kurosawa. I TOUCHED THE VOID, MAN! IT WAS LIKE A CRUSHED VELVET PLATYPUS VAGINA! Thank goodness Vulture was there to break this story about a Zack Snyder Star Wars movie based on Seven Samurai and put things right again. That was close.
He is in fact developing a Star Wars project for Lucasfilm that is set within the series’ galaxy, though parallel to the next trilogy. It will be an as-yet-untitled Jedi epic loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai, with the ronin and katana being replaced by the Force-wielding knights and their iconic lightsabers.
It’s not clear just where Snyder’s untitled Jedi film would fall within the Star Wars chronology, but one insider expects it will not be considered part of the “numbered” episodes, but rather a stand-alone film set sometime post–Episode VI events, meaning the next phase of the franchise development is much broader than previously thought. For those unfamiliar, Kurosawa’s influential Seven Samurai (The Magnificent Seven was the American remake) tells the tale of a small agrarian town in sixteenth-century Japan that’s routinely pillaged by bandits. Fed up with the annual shakedown, its farmers retain the services of seven masterless samurai to defend their harvest. One of the film’s stars, Toshiro Mifune, was initially offered the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi (as Kotaku recounts here). [Vulture]
Combining Star Wars and Seven Samurai is taking the two cultural products that have been digested and sh*t back out into the cultural zeitgeist more often than almost anything else into one giant, digested-sh*t snowball and then throwing it at us (btw, have you ever put a dog turd inside a snowball? A+ prank). As ToplessRobot points out, someone even already did a Star Wars take on Seven Samurai back in 1980, called Battle Beyond the Stars:
