Director Kevin Smith’s Vision For Star Wars VII

In a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, director Kevin Smith lays out his vision for Star Wars VII now that Disney’s purchased LucasFilms from George Lucas.

Posted on their website and available in next Friday’s (November 16) hard copy issue of THR, Smith recounts a childhood spent playing Star Wars with his friends every summer. One of the games they would play was reimagining the Star Wars universe, making fan-favorite character “Boba Fett” a central figure in the action of the original trilogy.

Sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain, Smith created an alternate universe where Fett interacted with the main characters. In their interpretation of the films, Boba Fett became an integral figure throughout the action as a result of time-warping through the different films:

“The plot of our backyard adventure: Boba Fett gets trapped by robotic gunslinger IG-88 in a Star Wars universe time loop, sending him through all the movies as well as moments only referenced in the flicks. In some eras, he’s a hero — even getting to kiss Princess Leia instead of Luke (this was before Return of the Jedi made ’em relatives). Other times when the chrono-belt pulled him into another era, Fett’s the villain he’s always known as in the flicks. The time-travel plot allowed us to touch on the well-told stories of the movies we so adored, but it also gave us a chance to mash ’em up with the funkier flights-of-fancy Pete and I would manufacture. It was like an episode of Quantum Leap before that show ever existed, and it was our favorite Star Wars adventure.”

Smith believes this is the perfect solution to allow Disney to bring back the original saga’s stars:

“If Disney wants to make another cool billion dollars like it did with The Avengers last summer, all it needs to do is make a Boba Fett time-travel flick. It would center on a character everyone digs and allow for a greatest hits of Star Wars while playing with an already-established timeline, a la Back to the Future. You could use every living (and dead) actor from the previous Star Wars films, no matter what their age — which means Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford can come and play as well. It’d be a dream come true for any Star Wars fan, particularly those of us who opted out of the boring-ass real world every summer for galaxies far, far away.”

I’m not sure if Disney will be going in this direction, but, if they do, they owe Kevin Smith a story credit for his take on the plot of Star Wars Episode VII.