This December will see the release of Rebel Moon, the latest film by the Internet’s most polarizing director, Zack Snyder, that will see him channeling his well-documented love of Star Wars into his very own sci-fi epic. Curiously enough, Rebel Moon has its origins in a failed Star Wars pitch that Snyder delivered to Lucasfilm over a decade ago. He intended to take the franchise in a more mature direction with a plot that was largely unconnected to the wider Skywalker Saga, but a general lack of interest and the studio’s acquisition by Disney resulted in it never advancing beyond the preliminary stages. Rather than letting his ideas go to waste, Snyder spent the next decade reworking the concept into an original creation that eventually found a home at Netflix, becoming his latest attempt to create an IP that multiple projects can spin out from. Since Rebel Moon was announced, there has been immense speculation about what a Snyder-directed Star Wars might have looked like. Considering Snyder’s reputation as one of the most "love him or hate him" directors currently working, it’s safe to say it would have been controversial.

Snyder's Star Wars Movie Was Inspired by 'Seven Samurai'

Toshirô Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, Yoshio Inaba, Daisuke Katô, Isao Kimura, Seiji Miyaguchi, and Takashi Shimura ready to fight in 'Seven Samurai'

When exactly Snyder delivered his pitch to Lucasfilm is unclear, but we do know that it occurred sometime during its final years as an independent company before it was purchased by Disney in 2012. At the time, the Star Wars franchise was in a state of limbo – the mixed response to the prequels had put a damper on a series that was previously blemish-free, and while retroactive opinions were beginning to skew more positive, the close alignment between that trilogy and the larger expanded universe was continuing to prove divisive. Meanwhile, despite box-office numbers indicating that there was an appetite for additional films, creator George Lucas seemed more interested in a live-action television series tentatively titled Star Wars: Underworld that was ultimately placed on indefinite hiatus due to budgetary concerns. Star Wars was still printing money like nothing else, but for a franchise that had once led the way in storytelling and technological revolutions, it appeared to have hit a roadblock it was struggling to circumvent.

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It was in this period of indecision that Snyder pitched his ideas to Lucasfilm about what the next generation of Star Wars could look like. In typical Snyder fashion, the film would have eschewed the family-friendly approach of previous entries for a more mature tone, all based around a Seven Samurai-inspired plot that would have focused on a new cast of characters in a previously unexplored region of the universe. Snyder would later summarize his Star Wars pitch as “Give me the keys and let me take it for a spin,” implying that he had no intention of simply regurgitating existing stories. This is nothing new for Snyder – while many of his creative decisions proved contentious, his DC films showed considerable bravery when deviating from established lore to allow for a more personalized take on the material – but a large reason for Star Wars’ popularity has been its reluctance to stray from a successful formula. Given Snyder’s career-long refusal to curtail to the demands of Hollywood producers, his pitch would have hit a stumbling block before he had even left the meeting room.

While Snyder has been reluctant to share further details, he has confirmed that the intended plot changed very little after it was retooled as an original IP – something that a glance at Rebel Moon’s promotional material makes abundantly clear. "A peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy is threatened by the armies of a tyrannical regent," the synopsis proclaims, a description that immediately conjures images of an oppressed group of rebels battling against the inconceivable might of a Galactic Empire (plus bonus points for it all taking place in a futuristic landscape whose basic world-building and character design owes a debt to the films of Akira Kurosawa). Snyder may have plastered his script with a fresh coat of paint, but the original foundations are still very much present, making it easier to theorize about what it originally would have looked like.

A Snyder-directed Star Wars film Would Likely Have Been Highly Stylized ... and Probably Polarizing

Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach in Watchmen
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

For starters, it almost certainly would have been polarizing. While early 2010s Snyder had not yet reached the point where the mere mention of his name was enough to summon the most passionate critics from both sides of the Internet, the filmmaking style he had pioneered with 300 and Watchmen had already earned him a sizeable number of champions and detractors. What he lacked in elegant storytelling and nuanced character work he made up for with some of the most operatic visuals and action sequences in modern cinema, giving him an immediately recognizable style that has made him one of the few directors in the blockbuster genre capable of imbuing each frame with that illusive personal touch. His adaptation of Watchmen may have failed to grasp the subtleties that made its namesake such an enduring piece of literature, but when viewed as a standalone product, there’s a lot to admire about Snyder’s bold direction that managed to give this widely read story an entirely new and distinctive feel (even while vehemently following the source material).

But Star Wars is a very different beast. Ever since Lucas premiered his vision of a galaxy far, far away in 1977’s A New Hope, the particular aesthetic that feeds into every facet of Star Wars has become so identifiable that even someone who hasn’t watched the films will be able to discern them. This doesn’t mean that creators can’t experiment with the formula – they just have to do so while still adhering to the basic (and proven) framework that has made Star Wars the cultural phenomenon that it is. It’s within this finite space for flexibility that the most artistically challenging and creatively fulfilling storytelling in the entire Star Wars franchise can be found (affirming the old theory about constraint creating creativity). But it’s hard to imagine Snyder – a man who paints his canvases with the largest possible brushstrokes – being able to replicate this delicate balance, especially after Man of Steel and Batman v Superman exemplified his unwillingness to alter his style regardless of how it suited the subject matter.

The darker tone that Snyder would have inevitably brought to the project would also have been troublesome. A crucial part of Star Wars’ continued success is its universality, with even its more adult-oriented entries like Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith never venturing too far into mature content that would make them inaccessible to a younger audience. To be fair to Snyder, he was able to maintain a PG-13 rating for most of his time at DC, but he never appeared comfortable working within these guidelines, and the dour nature of their plots often felt ill-suited to such a certificate (no wonder Batman v Superman and Zack Snyder's Justice League both received R-rated cuts in time for their home video release). The mandate for Star Wars to be family friendly will never change, and while Snyder has demonstrated a capacity for achieving such a tone (albeit to within an inch of its life), the necessary changes that his proposed film would have had to go through to earn it would have sacrificed much of what had drawn him to the project in the first place.

Reworking 'Rebel Moon' as an Original Idea Will Allow It to Reach Its Full Potential

Sofia Boutella in Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon
Image via Netflix

It's been 10 years since Snyder pitched his Star Wars concept to Lucasfilm in the hopes of making his childhood dream a reality, and while he unfortunately didn’t succeed, clearly those ideas left a lasting impression. Thanks to his current partnership with Netflix, Snyder is now free to tell his story without the restrictions that come from working in an already-established franchise. Together with his fellow writers, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, Snyder has a unique opportunity to create a mythology where the only limit is his imagination, and hopefully he will take full advantage of this to preempt the criticisms of Rebel Moon being just a Star Wars knockoff. He may not be realizing the film as originally intended, but the stylized nature of Snyder’s direction would never have fit neatly into the Star Wars universe (a sentiment he has comes to terms with in later years). Besides, given how polarizing both have since become, maybe it’s for the best that they’re kept separate, lest we start ending up with $200 million films that appeal to only a tiny subset of viewers.