We’ve heard about a lot of Star Wars movie projects that have tried to happen in the last almost seven years since The Rise of Skywalker, but perhaps the one that stung most was the one that came out of nowhere late last year, when Adam Driver and Steven Soderbergh casually revealed that they had worked on and pitched a movie about the return of the redeemed Kylo Ren to Lucasfilm, only for Disney higher-ups to kill it. But since then, both Lucasfilm and Disney have undergone significant leadership changes. Could The Hunt for Ben Solo live again?
“Nope.” That was Soderbergh’s blunt answer in a new interview with The Playlist.
“I don’t regret one minute of the time we spent working on that,” the writer-director continued. “I felt the work was good. It’s just good for you to be in that room and working on it. It’s like CrossFit—it’s good for you. It’ll have a residual effect that will be unexpected at some point.”
For Star Wars fans, however, that residual effect probably won’t be felt in the galaxy far, far away. The moment Soderbergh knew Hunt wasn’t getting a Disney greenlight, he moved on, which is why we’ve even been able to hear him talk about it so frankly in the last few months anyway. “As soon as it became apparent, OK, not gonna happen, I sat down and started writing [something else],” Soderbergh added. “It’s like, ‘OK, new scenario, let’s get cracking.’ At a certain point, it’s like complaining about the weather. You just gotta keep moving.”
And so, The Hunt For Ben Solo joins a murderer’s row of scrapped Star Wars film projects from the last few years, never to be seen by the rest of us. Maybe someone else will be able to convince Driver, Lucasfilm, and Disney alike to return to the idea at some point—but at least for now, Star Wars‘ cinematic future lies in the hands of The Mandalorian and Grogu next month, and Ryan Gosling the year after.
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