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This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free. It’s always a cruel twist of the knife when fans hear about what could have been—ideas that sounds incredible on paper but just never came to fruition for whatever reason. But the case of Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars pitch feels particularly cruel. In a recent interview, Adam Driver revealed that he’d come to Steven Soderbergh some years ago with an idea for a Star Wars film that would close the book on the character Driver played in three Star Wars sequels between 2015 and 2019—Ben Solo aka Kylo Ren, the wayward, Dark Side-of-the-Force-swayed son of Han Solo and Princess Leia. What began as a conversation between creative friends apparently got very real. A finished script (co-written with Rebecca Blount and Scott Z. Burns) made it all the way up the creative and corporate chain to Disney CEO Bob Iger, before being rejected—supposedly because in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, Ben Solo died. Because Ben Solo died? We need a whistleblower at Lucasfilm to come forward, keep it tall, and tell us the real reason, because this franchise has given a whole TV series to a fan-favorite character who “died.” Not long ago, they were even close to encore-ing someone who literally got cut in half. In Star Wars, death doesn’t always hold weight—which is a big narrative problem for sure, but not one to concern yourself with when the guy who gave us the Ocean’s trilogy wants to build with you. And it’s because of that flimsy excuse that Star Wars fans are reacting to this whole thing like a slap in the face. What started as an innocuous aside from Adam Driver during a recent interview has blown up into a continuing story with Soderbergh himself chiming in almost immediately after. It started with Driver revealing that he would reprise the character with the right director and the right story, and he and Soderbergh had actually fleshed out one that was “handmade,” “character-driven” and “one of the coolest projects he’d ever been a part of.” “We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea,” Driver told the Associated Press. “They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it. We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman, and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.” Soderbergh later added that he asked LucasFilm head honcho Kathleen Kennedy if the studio “had ever turned in a finished movie script for greenlight to Disney and had it rejected. She said no, this was a first.” So, yeah, it is kind of a slap in the face, given that LucasFilm’s next two flagship releases are a lifeless-looking Mandalorian movie and a standalone film from the great faux-teur of our time, Shawn Levy. The sad part is that as cool as this likely would have been, Star Wars as a franchise is pretty cooked. Solo bricked so hard that we haven’t had a standalone character movie since. The Mandalorian flamed out by the end of its TV run, and the Star Wars TV shows that followed were either craven, down-the-middle nostalgia plays—looking at you, Obi-Wan (Ewan innocent, though)—or took too long to truly get interesting. Whether you think The Last Jedi is a masterpiece or an affront (I’m near the middle, but closer to the masterpiece side, for the record), we can all agree that looking back, a trilogy by three different writer-directors working without a single unified story was doomed from the start. As such, even the stuff that sort of worked in those movies doesn’t really rate as something I’m interested to see more of. Rey Skywalker’s characterization is a little too shoddy for me to get hype about her return to the big screen. And honestly, I can say the same for Ben Solo, a name I honestly forgot for a split second since he typically goes by his villain name in the space streets and I haven’t revisited those films since the trilogy wrapped six years ago. Really, the only draw here would’ve been Soderbergh, a guy who can basically get me to see anything his name is attached to. That LucasFilm and Disney didn’t pick up on that and leap at the chance to welcome a veteran talent into the family and let him do whatever he wants, shows that they’re woefully lost and have no idea where to go. (Creatively, that is—surely The Mandalorian and Grogu will make tons of money, even though it looks like a glorified episode of the TV show.) It shows that they’ve learned nothing from the critical acclaim of Andor, the lone crown jewel of this Disney-Star Wars experiment—an idea and execution that’s thoroughly distinct to its creator Tony Gilroy but nevertheless expounds on the greater Star Wars themes in a more interesting and exciting way than perhaps any other sequel or spin-off has since the original. Andor concluded this year, with a final season that has an arguable claim at being the best of the year. The series is engaging, it’s exciting, and it’s one of the only spin-offs to really grow something interesting and forward-looking from the seeds of George Lucas’s ideas about fascism and rebellion. Gilroy is the guy who can take a super-sci-fi concept like the Death Star and ground its creation in a storyline about deep state politics and media manipulation. Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Iger should be throwing everything at him to stay and make something else—his own trilogy, another series, whatever he wants. Instead, and I can’t stress this enough, the next big live-action Star Wars project is being brought to you by the man who made Free Guy. This franchise needs a harder reset than a standalone from one of the all-time greats could provide, but I’m sure The Hunt For Ben Solo would still have been tough. Someone convince Tony Gilroy to lead his own rebellion in the Disney offices, and maybe we can rebuild from there.
