Star Wars Blew Its Chance to Make a Steven Soderbergh Kylo Ren Movie

Even those hyped for the upcoming release of The Mandalorian and Grogu have to admit that things look bad for Star Wars right now. Yes, we just got the end of Andor, an incredibly urgent and complex piece of sci-fi storytelling that somehow spun out of the memberberry-riddled prequel Rogue One. But outside of that, it’s been a lot of disposable Disney+ shows and the inescapable shadow of the mess that was The Rise of Skywalker.

So, surely, if Adam Driver, easily one of the best actors of his generation, wanted to keep playing Kylo Ren, Disney would green light that thing immediately, right? Especially if he got Scott Z. Burns, writer of The Bourne Ultimatum and The Informant! to come up with a script, right? And especially if he got Steven Soderbergh—the guy who made Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight—to direct, right? You would have to be an idiot not to get that movie made immediately!

Well, guess what kind of people are running Disney? Because according to Driver, that’s exactly what happened to what the actor told AP was “one of the coolest (expletive) scripts I had ever been a part of.” Driver explained to the outlet that he “always was interested in doing another Star Wars,” so when Kathleen Kennedy asked him about it, he answered, “With a great director and a great story, I’d be there in a second. I loved that character and loved playing him.”

Upon Kennedy’s urging, Driver got Burns and Soderbergh on board for a movie set after the events of Rise of Skywalker. “It was called The Hunt for Ben Solo and it was really cool,” Driver revealed. “We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it.”

So what happened? The Disney bosses got hung up on that same old bane of nerdy properties: continuity. Because The Hunt for Ben Solo would have taken place after Rise of Skywalker, the new movie had to explain how Kylo Ren came back to life after dying in the previous film. Driver says Burns and Soderberg had a fix for that problem, but Disney didn’t buy it. “We took it to [Disney CEO] Bob Iger and [co-chairman] Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive,” Driver stated. “And that was that.”

Obviously, it’s frustrating that Disney would pass on such a compelling movie idea simply because they got hung up on a plot detail in franchise that has space wizards and sentient robots. But perhaps such terrible decisions are a thing of the past in Disney’s Star Wars offices. Perhaps they realize that giving Dave Filoni free rein to recreate the Clone Wars cartoons only appeals to a small subset of millennials and nobody else. Perhaps they’ll look at the success of Andor and realize that letting intelligent creators take creative and political risks with their franchise will result in richer, more satisfying stories?

Or maybe they’ll just spend gobs of money on another mess like Rise of Skywalker. Yeah, that seems right.

Star Wars: The Hunt for Ben Kenobi isn’t coming to theaters anywhere because Disney thought it was a bad idea.