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Take all the essential ingredients of Star Wars – samurais in space, adventure among the wookiees, aliens with backward syntax, evil cyborgs with a penchant for murder by telekinesis – then imagine George Lucas hadn’t given us all of that through a PG prism. This, it appears, is what Ryan Reynolds did when pitching to Disney. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do an R-rated Star Wars property?’” Reynolds told The Box Office podcast. “‘It doesn’t have to be overt, A+ characters. There’s a wide range of characters you could use.’ And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”
Let’s imagine the scene: a gaggle of studio execs are nervously cowering before the Hollywood A-lister’s megawatt smirk as he reveals his idea for a take on George Lucas’s space opera that doesn’t hold back. This is Star Wars Tarantino-style. Perhaps Mando’s got a drug problem, or Chewie really does rip people’s arms off – and beat them to death with the wet ends. Somewhere over in Coruscant a Jedi slices a corrupt senator into symmetrical chunks without ever unsheathing his saber. Or maybe Reynolds just thinks the galaxy far, far away could use a little more Deadpool & Wolverine-style sweary irreverence.
He’s wrong. Push Star Wars too far into the realm of self-aware snark, or nudge it to start laughing at itself before the audience does, and you undercut the very thing that keeps fans tethered to its dusty, big-hearted mythos. We already have umpteen animated takedowns – Robot Chicken’s fever-dream dismemberments, Family Guy’s fart-laced remakes – and they’re fine, in their way. But if Star Wars ever starts mimicking the shows that exist solely to mock it, then the circle will be complete.
Having said that, it’s impossible to dismiss completely the idea of a darker, more adult take, because all the essential ingredients are already in place. There are very few kids’ movies in which a father cuts off his own child’s limbs, or a giant slug-monster chains a bikini-clad hostage to its throne. There are not many movies fit for a Saturday matinee that feature swamp goblins gaslighting traumatised orphans. From despair-fuelled redemption arcs to slow-burn patricide, Star Wars already has everything it needs to drop the family-friendly facade and lean fully into its dark side.
Andor, and to a lesser extent Rogue One, have already shown that it’s possible to dispense with the fairytale veneer. Perhaps what Reynolds is saying is that if superhero movies can prosper by dismantling their own mythology in a blaze of sweary sarcasm, why shouldn’t space-opera flicks find similar salvation in a galaxy where blood spurts with wild abandon like the Kurosawan epics that Lucas borrowed so much from in the first place.
Perhaps it’s a terrible idea and would ruin everything that feels sacred about Star Wars. But just for a moment imagine it: a galaxy not full of hope but hangovers. Where Force ghosts don’t offer guidance, they just hover awkwardly, muttering regrets. Where Chewbacca’s fur is matted with something unspeakable and the lightsabers don’t hum, they scream.
