A new Star Wars movie is on the way from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold, and it's going to be set tens of thousands of years back on the Star Wars timeline. Why set it so far in the past? Well, it's because Mangold doesn't want his hands tied by Star Wars's formidable canon.

James Mangold, who just picked up a Directors Guild of America nomination for “A Complete Unknown,” recently told MovieWeb that his upcoming “Star Wars” movie is deliberately set thousands of years before any other movie in the long-running franchise so that he doesn’t have to deal with the canon and can thus avoid angering fans.

James Mangold is taking the phrase, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” quite literally. Mangold’s Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi will be a prequel movie set thousands of years before the Skywalker Saga.

The thing James Mangold finds most appealing about his Dawn of the Jedi movie may also allow the film to chart a bold new future for Star Wars.