Copyright Inverse
The creative minds at Lucasfilm are usually transparent with fans, which is both a blessing and a curse. When whole movies — whole trilogies, even — are announced in the early stages of development only to later be shelved, fans are kept in the loop but haunted by thoughts of what could have been. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, as beyond all the announced projects that fall apart are those that don’t even go public before they’re cancelled. A new quote from Adam Driver reveals how we almost got a sequel to the sequel trilogy that would have made a huge change to Star Wars canon... which is the very reason it won’t come to fruition. In an AP interview, Adam Driver discussed how he wasn’t satisfied with Ben Solo/Kylo Ren’s story in the sequel trilogy. Kylo did redeem himself in The Rise of Skywalker, but saving Rey cost him his life. Driver felt the character had “unfinished business,” so he approached acclaimed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh — who most recently directed Black Bag — to develop a movie that continued Kylo’s story. Soderbergh and his wife, Jules Asner, who writes under the pseudonym Rebecca Blunt, drafted a rough story called The Hunt for Ben Solo. They then pitched it to Lucasfilm bigshots, including President Kathleen Kennedy and Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni. They seemed into it, so screenwriter and frequent Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z. Burns was brought on to flesh out the script, which Driver called, “one of the coolest (expletive) scripts I had ever been a part of.” But everything fell apart when the project got to Disney CEO Bob Iger. “We presented the script to Lucasfilm,” Driver said. “They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it. We took it to Bob Iger and [Co-Chairman] Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.” It’s true that Kylo Ren was very dead. But between Palpatine’s sudden return in The Rise of Skywalker and Boba Fett blasting out of the Sarlacc pit to appear in The Mandalorian, it’s clear that being dead isn’t much of an obstacle to a popular Star Wars character. There’s no issue with movies being set after the sequel trilogy, either, as Sharmain Obaid-Chinoy’s Rey sequel is officially greenlit. Maybe the script wasn’t as good as Driver is hyping it up to be, or maybe Iger wants to move on from the shaky sequel era as much as possible; it was Kylo Ren, after all, who said we should leave the past behind. For whatever reason, it seems like this project is officially as dead as Kylo is. “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head,” Soderbergh said. “I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.” But maybe that’s where the best Star Wars movies live: in our heads, where they’re full of potential and can’t disappoint us.
