'Andor' Writer Beau Willimon Stays In 'Star Wars' To Co-Write James Mangold's Movie

The film, exploring the origins of the Force was announced last year at Star Wars Celebration Europe

Beau Willimon may have written “One way out!”, but now he’s choosing to stay in. The playwright, screenwriter and American House of Cards developer has been chosen to partner with James Mangold on his script for his Star Wars movie that was revealed last year at Star Wars Celebration Europe.

Currently working under the title Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi, the film will explore the origins of the Force, a very long 25,000 years before the Skywalker Saga. This film would be the earliest-set non-literary piece of media in the franchise, if not its entirety, well beyond the High Republic-set series The Acolyte premiering in June on Disney+. There are no specific plot details available yet. Mangold will be ready to focus on the film after finishing his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown at Searchlight Pictures that stars Timothée Chalamet. Currently, neither it nor the films it was announced with at Celebration have release dates, but a fourth, The Mandalorian and Grogu received the May 22, 2026 spot staked out for the franchise. Two like it are currently in place for the same December weekend preceding Christmas, one that year and the other the next.

Willimon comes in with experience in the Star Wars universe, having written three episodes of Andor, the acclaimed Star Wars series focused on Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor. His credits are on “Narkina 5”, “Nobody’s Listening!” and the prison breakout adventure “One Way Out”. The latter earned him an Emmy nomination for outstanding writing for a drama series and featured Andy Serkis’s Kino Loy heartbreakingly say, “I can’t swim”. Along with having developed the American remake of House of Cards, he was showrunner on the first four seasons. He co-wrote 2011’s Ryan Gosling-starring political thriller The Ides of March and created Hulu’s space drama The First.

Mangold said of his vision for the film, which Willimon will help feed, at the time of announcement “When I first started talking to Kathy [Kennedy] about doing one of these pictures, what occurred to me was thinking about what kind of genre of movie within Star Wars I wanted to do. And I thought about a biblical epic, like a Ten Commandments, about the dawning of the Force. Where did the Force come from, when did we discover it, when did we learn how to use it?”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter