Donald Glover is shifting gears with his planned Disney+ Lando series. The project is now being developed as a film for Lucasfilm, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
Glover’s brother, Stephen Glover, was working on the project with Donald before the writers strike began in May, and during an appearance on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast posted Thursday, revealed the latest plans were to make a film. The project is on hold currently amid the dual writer and actors strike.
Donald Glover played Lando Calrissian in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. The film was a box office bomb, but Glover earned a strong response for his work as the character — and in December 2020, Disney announced the series was in the works.
Justin Simien (Haunted Mansion) was initially tapped to develop series, but exited prior to Donald and Stephen Glover taking over writing duties. That was when the project morphed into a feature.
In April, Donald Glover told GQ of a potential project with Lando: “I’m not interested in doing anything that is going to be a waste of my time or just a paycheck. I would much rather spend time with people I enjoy. It just has to be the right thing, which I think it could be. Lando is definitely somebody I’d like to hang out with. We’re talking about it. That’s as much as I can say.”
Billy Dee Williams originated the character of charming space smuggler Lando in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and played him again in Return of the Jedi (1983). Decades later, he reprised the role in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Williams and Donald Glover met before the filming of Solo.
As Donald Glover recalled of the meeting to THR in 2017: “I was like, ‘I’ve always felt like this character could do this, and he represents this, and I kind of feel like he comes from here, and it’s very obvious he has a lot of taste, so maybe he grew up seeing that from afar? Because I’m like that. Maybe he saw it from other planets and was like, ‘I want to be that.’” Glover added, laughing as he shared the memory, “He just let me ramble on and on, and then finally I was like, ‘So, what do you think?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t know about all that. Just be charming.’“
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