The elder Corleone in The Godfather also rejects the drug trade and resists calls to “do murder.” Stability and safety are more important to the boss at that point in his life. “You think about what things are off limits. Don Corleone wasn’t just doing everything to line his pockets as he got later into his career,” Favreau says. “You look at De Niro, in the flashbacks in The Godfather: Part II, as he’s walking down the streets. He’s seen as somebody who’s actually creating, someone the people respect because of the way he conducts himself. There’s lots of different ways to run an empire. There’s the Sonny Corleone way, there’s the Michael Corleone way, and then there’s the Vito Corleone way.”
One is hotheaded, the other is cold-blooded. The last one is even-tempered—even if that moderation endlessly divided longtime Star Wars obsessives.
Jon Favreau says hello to his little friend.
While Favreau turned to Francis Ford Coppola’s mob saga for inspiration, director Robert Rodriguez, who helmed multiple episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, drew inspiration from the sword and sorcery barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard. “We would talk to Robert about Conan,” Favreau says. “Conan starts off as a young warrior and then ages up through the books until he’s Conan the King. So how is Boba the crime lord going to be different, knowing what he knows, than what he would’ve been when he was a younger man?”
The short answer, according to Favreau: “I think he’s just wise…. He’s also a much older character because now we’re after the original trilogy. He’s at a different point of his life, having experienced what we had seen in all the previous films.”
While this may or may not satisfy viewers who wanted Boba Fett to be more ferocious, it does finally reveal what was in the minds of the storytellers behind The Book of Boba Fett. Until now, they’ve been as tight-lipped as their title character in his early movie appearances.
There’s no shortage of possible kingpin models—James Gandolfini’s mob boss in The Sopranos was a charming sociopath, Al Pacino’s Scarface was a frenetic madman, Javier Bardem’s hitman in No Country for Old Men was an emotionless force of nature. Ultimately, The Book of Boba Fett tried to take the more soulful approach to a man haunted by his past wrongdoing, but unable to exist in any other world.
The legend of Boba Fett may have simply overtaken the reality George Lucas presented onscreen. “Boba Fett is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I grew up with Boba Fett as a faceless, quiet, mysterious bounty hunter. All we knew was that he was scary enough that Darth Vader saw him as somebody to set out after Han Solo,” Favreau says. “Then by the time you hit the second movie that Boba was in, Return of the Jedi, that was a different version of the character. He got knocked into the Sarlacc pit and passed away. I think people assumed he would’ve lasted longer in that situation.”
But no, he didn’t.
Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) advises Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) in The Book of Boba Fett.
Decades later, Favreau devised a new story in which Fett claws his way out of the Sarlacc’s belly, and that same desperate survivor instinct is what became the core of his ascension in The Book of Boba Fett as a criminal with a code of honor.
Filoni, who got his start at Lucasfilm creating the animated Clone Wars series with Lucas, agrees that fans buy into the myth of Boba Fett rather than accept that he was often more clever than he was combative. “Boba Fett calls Darth Vader to capture Han Solo, he doesn’t capture Han Solo,” Filoni notes of Fett’s big moment in Empire. “He gets on the phone and he says, ‘Come here and get Han Solo, I found him.’”
Star Wars: The Rebellion Will Be Televised
He also disagrees with the popularly held notion that Fett was one of the few characters who could defy Darth Vader. “It’s funny when you say he stands up to Darth Vader. Does he do that? I think he was hired and Vader tells him, ‘No disintegrations,’ and he’s like, ‘…Okay,’” Filoni says. “I love Boba Fett but even when I was a kid, the idea that he fell into the Sarlacc pit actually never disappointed me because I’m like, ‘The story is not about him.’”
With The Book of Boba Fett, the story finally was about him. Even so, the man inside the mask continues to live in his own shadow.
