James Mangold is about to join two huge franchises in the near future, as the director of a new Star Wars movie and the DCU’s Swamp Thing reboot. However, the Logan and Indiana Jones helmer has recently shared some harsh opinions on how current trends of extensive universe building are becoming the “death of storytelling.”

Mangold has been behind several movies from some of the world’s biggest franchises. He has created two Wolverine movies for Marvel – the last being the stunning Logan in 2017 – and took over from Steven Spielberg to direct last year’s final Indiana Jones outing. Now Mangold has two more big movies linked to high-profile franchises on the horizon, with his Dawn of the Jedi Star Wars movie, and his Swamp Thing film for James Gunn’s DCU. But the director himself isn’t a fan of multiverses and continuous stories that run across several movies and beyond.

While speaking to Rolling Stone about his latest offering, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Mangold shared his candid thoughts on the movie industry’s obsession with expanding universes and cross-media stories, calling them the “enemy” of good cinema content. Responding to a question of whether Joaquin Phoenix could appear in the new movie as Johnny Cash, in a crossover from Mangold’s Walk the Line, the director said:

“I don’t do multiverses. It’s weird that I’ve even worked in the world of IP entertainment because I don’t like multi-movie universe-building. It’s the enemy of storytelling. The death of storytelling. It’s more interesting to people the way the Legos connect than the way the story works in front of us. For me, the goal becomes, always, ‘What is unique about this film, and these characters?’ Not making you think about some other movie or some Easter egg or something else, which is all an intellectual act, not an emotional act. You want the movie to work on an emotional level.”

It’s the enemy of storytelling. The death of storytelling.

James Mangold Has Clear, Singular Storytelling Vision

As Mangold said, it is puzzling why he has ended up playing with the sandbox of several big IPs over the years. While he has gained great acclaim for movies such as Walk the Line, Girl, Interrupted, 3:10 to Yuma, and Identity, his Marvel and Indiana Jones movies have seemingly put him into the path of several other upcoming movies that will require a certain amount of “world-building” to please the audiences they are aimed at.

However, movies like The Wolverine and Logan, despite featuring Hugh Jackman’s comic book hero and other characters associated with previous movies in the X-Men franchise, they are also stories that stand very much apart from what came before. The Wolverine provided a different origin story to that of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Logan was a dark and brutal story that could not have been much different from the bright, SFX-driven X-Men movies that preceded it.

Related James Mangold Reveals Disney Ditched an R-Rated Star Wars Film Logan director James Mangold spills the beans on a gritty R-rated Boba Fett film that Disney scrapped.

However, Mangold now had a big task ahead of him in both the DCU and Star Wars franchises. While Swamp Thing seems to be shaping up as a stand-alone story very much in the vein of Logan, Mangold’s Star Wars movie is expected to kick-start a whole new era for the space opera. Perhaps this is why his movie is set thousands of years before the current Star Wars movie timeline, allowing him a mostly clear slate when it comes to characters and plot. Whether the incredibly critical fandom wants a stand-alone Star Wars story is something we can only wait to find out.

James Mangold’s next movie,
A Complete Unknown
, stars Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan and is released in December.