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:
Meanwhile, Rifftrax has a forum topic on the number of different movies based on Seven Samurai. That this by no means a complete list should give you an idea of how many there are:
Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai) 1954
The Magnificent Seven (most famous remake) 1960 —> (sequels) Return of the Seven 1966, Guns of the Magnificent Seven 1969, The Magnificent Seven Ride! 1972,
Liu he qian shou (Return of the Scorpion; kung fu remake of SS) 1979
Battle Beyond the Stars (Star Wars style remake of Magnificent Seven) 1980
I Sette Magnifici Gladiatori (The Seven Magnificent Gladiators; sword and sandal remake starring Lou Ferrigno) 1983
Dune Warriors (post apocalyptic remake starring David Carradine) 1990
Dikiy Vostok (The Wild East; remake featuring dwarves being attacked by bikers in post-Soviet Asia, produced by Kazakhstan [not Uzbekistan assholes, high five!]) 1993
“The Magnificent Seven” (TV series) 1998-2000
Samurai 7 (a terrible [imo] futurized anime version that airs on Showtime, only spawning to be aproved by the Kurosawa estate) 2005
Two boring tastes that go great together! However, I’ll change my mind if Robert Downey Jr. plays all the characters as racist, Mickey Rooney-esque caricatures in the Asian-face make up from Cloud Atlas.
Or, hopefully it will just be two hours of guys shouting “F*ck you!” and “Suck my dick!” like Bobby Hacker’s Star Wars movie.