Star Wars is now 44 years old and shows little sign of waning in popularity. While the franchise was largely off screens between 1983 and 1997, there has been a wealth of movies and TV shows released over the past four decades. As well as the nine Skywalker Saga movies, we've had '80s Ewok films, original trilogy special editions, more recent spin-off movies, multiple animated series, The Mandalorian, and of course, a notorious Holiday Special. And there's plenty more to come over the next few years.
But despite all these movies and shows, there is still a fascinating list of projects that never reached the screen. Some of these are film ideas that George Lucas suggested back in the early days of the franchise, while others are more recent movies that were scrapped, drastically changed, or turned into TV shows.
There are also various projects that Lucas was working on prior to his sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012. While Disney now owns these in whatever form they were left, the studio has shown little interest in resurrecting them.
We've listed the most fascinating examples of Star Wars projects that were announced or mentioned but never actually made, were drastically changed during production, or that we learned about long after they were scrapped. Of course, some of these might yet appear in some form--and in fact, it's likely the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ show bears some resemblance to the abandoned movie. But for the most part, we can only imagine how they might have turned out.
1. Wookiee and Droid movies
In the early days of Star Wars, George Lucas mentioned ideas for potential movies that would never actually happen. One of these was a film focusing on droids, while another would feature Wookiees. In 1980, he told Prevue magazine "as I was writing [A New Hope], I came up with some ideas for a film about robots, with no humans in it." He also stated, "When I got to working on the Wookiee, I thought of a film just about Wookiees, nothing else. So, for a time, I had a couple of odd movies with just those characters."
2. George Lucas's Sequel Trilogy
Lucas had been planning to make the final three movies in a nine-film saga long before The Force Awakens hit theaters. Way back in the late '70s, Lucas was talking about a potential nine-part saga, and he had actively started to develop story ideas after the completion of the prequels in the '00s. According to interviews with Lucas for the book Star Wars Archives Episode 1-3 The Prequels, the plan was to make Darth Maul the main villain; he becomes the boss of a galaxy-wide crime organization after the collapse of the Empire. Leia leads the fight to take him down, while Luke attempts to rebuild the Jedi and train new warriors. Lucas gave Disney his sequel trilogy treatments when he sold Lucasfilm, but they were never used, something that he felt "betrayed" about, according to former Disney CEO Bob Iger.
3. Detours
Unlike every other show or movie on this list, Detours does in fact exist. But we'll probably never see it. It's a CG animated sketch comedy set in the Star Wars universe, created by Robot Chicken's Seth Green and Matthew Senreich and produced by Lucasfilm Animation. According to Green, 39 episodes had been completed prior to the Disney deal in 2012, but in 2013, the studio put the show on hiatus while it decided what direction to take the franchise in. A single episode leaked briefly in 2020, but earlier this year, Green explained that there "hasn't been enough interest high enough up to go through what it would take to put it out."
4. Underworld
Underworld was one of the final Star Wars projects that George Lucas was developing before he sold Lucasfilm. It would've been the franchise's first live-action show, and was set to be a dark, gritty exploration of the criminal underworld on the city-planet of Coruscant. Lucas stated that the scripts for 50 episodes had been completed, with Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica writer Ronald D. Moore among the names that had been assembled to work on it. A tech test for the show was even filmed, which later leaked online and gave us a small taste of what the show might have looked like. But the huge cost of producing the series meant that it never reached the production stage and once the Disney deal was done, the project was abandoned.
5. Clone Wars Younglings show
The Clone Wars was the one pre-Disney Star Wars property that the studio has kept alive, with a final season and the spin-off The Bad Batch released over the past couple of years. One Clone Wars-related show we didn't get was a spin-off series focusing on a group of young Jedi trainees that featured in The Clone Wars Season 5. In 2016, Lucasfilm story group member Pablo Hidalgo revealed that George Lucas considered removing the Younglings arc from Season 5, using it instead for a standalone show. Lucas even screened an 80-minute pilot episode consisting of the Season 5 Younglings footage at Star Wars Celebration in 2012. But ultimately it was decided to keep the story in Season 5.
6. 3D rereleases of Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith
The 3D resurgence of the late 2000s arrived at the wrong time for Star Wars--by the release of The Force Awakens in 2015, the format was (yet again) waning in popularity. But with no new movies to release in 3D, Lucasfilm made plans to convert the prequels for an audience hungry for post-Avatar 3D sci-fi fun. The 3D version of The Phantom Menace hit theaters in February 2012, with rereleases for Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith scheduled for fall 2013. But in January that year, plans changed. JJ Abrams was officially announced as the director of a new Star Wars movie, and the remaining 3D prequel rereleases were scrapped.
7. Boba Fett movie
Chronicle director Josh Trank was one of the first filmmakers to be attached to a post-Disney Star Wars spin-off movie, back in 2014. While the subject of his film was never officially announced, it was strongly rumored that it would focus on everyone's favorite original trilogy bounty hunter, Boba Fett. However, the project stalled when Trank exited in May 2015. In an interview last year, Trank confirmed it was indeed a Boba Fett movie, and stated that he "was going to be fired if I didn’t quit," following reports of behind-the-scenes problems on his superhero flop The Fantastic Four.
In 2018, Logan director James Mangold was reported to be working on a new script for a Boba Fett movie, but that never happened either. Fett eventually turned up in Season 2 of The Mandalorian and will be the focus of the upcoming show The Book of the Boba Fett, which hits Disney+ later this year.
8. Obi-Wan movie
Like the Boba Fett movie, the Obi-Wan film was never officially announced. But if reports are to be believed, it got as far as pre-production in London before the plug was pulled, following the commercial disappointment of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry was reportedly on board to direct, with Ewan McGregor expected to return as Kenobi, a role he previously played in the Star Wars prequels. The concept, which focuses on Obi-Wan's life in the years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, has subsequently been reworked into the upcoming Disney+ show.
9. Episode IX: Duel of the Fates
Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow exited Star Wars Episode IX in September 2017, with JJ Abrams returning to co-write and helm the final movie in the sequel trilogy. Reportedly, Lucasfilm wasn't happy with Trevorrow and co-writer Derek Connolly's script, and in early 2020, we finally got an idea of what their vision would've been. A leak of a screenplay titled Duel of the Fates hit the web, which Trevorrow subsequently confirmed was authentic. Duel of the Fates would've seen the return of Luke Skywalker (as a Force Ghost that haunts Kylo Renn), a much bigger role for Rose Tico, Chewie flying an X-Wing, Rey and Poe making out, and an uprising of the people on Coruscant.
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