JJ Abrams’s all-but-confirmed appointment to the director’s chair of Star Wars: Episode VII brings a close to one facet of speculation around the upcoming film. But it does open up another avenue of speculation that could be limitless – what kind of film would the other directors rumored to have been considered for the position made?
One director that was rumored to be on Disney’s shortlist of choices was X-Men: First Class’s Matthew Vaughn. At the time he stated that he was in the process of prepping The Secret Service, based on the comic book series created by Mark Millar, and that he wouldn’t be available.
But Bleeding Cool is reporting that Millar did meet with Lucasfilm head honcho Kathy Kennedy to discuss the possibility of directing Episode VII and that those discussions had progressed far enough that he supposedly pitched Kennedy on the idea of Kick Ass actress Chloe Moretz for a lead role in the film.
Now there are lots to extrapolate from that little nugget and much of it is contradictory. Is there a strong female lead in the screenplay that writer Michael Arndt is crafting? Or perhaps he had an idea for a female lead character that he wanted to add into the already planned out story. Vaughn has been known to take a strong hand in the scripting of his films, so I wouldn’t rule out the possibility here.
I am sure that there are some out there that will, with no actual reason to, use this as support for their hope that the new films will recognize the continuity built up in the Expanded Universe of Star Wars comics and novels and that Moretz would have been playing Jaina Solo, one of Han Solo and Princess Leia’s three children. Of course, if Moretz was being pitched for a role that would have been the child of one of the original Star Wars trilogy characters, this could conceivably have thrown the entire Expanded Universe into the trash.
But with the choice of Abrams for director, I suspect that we should be hearing some solid casting news sooner rather than later and from that we may be better able to extrapolate what Moretz’s role might have been if Vaugh had taken the job.
