Ever since Adam Driver let slip in October that Disney axed a planned Star Wars movie centering on his character Ben Solo, fans of the franchise have been rather upset that the studio didn’t greenlight the project.
But nobody can possibly be as frustrated as director Steven Soderbergh, who says he wasted nearly three years working on the script for The Hunt for Ben Solo (which Driver called “one of the coolest scripts I had ever been a part of”).
In a new interview, Soderbergh was asked about outgoing Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy calling the script “great” last month. Driver had previously said that while Lucasfilm “loved” their take, Disney CEO Bob Iger and co-chairman Alan Bergman rejected the project.
“It was no surprise that [Kennedy] was frustrated,” Soderbergh said in an interview with BK Mag. “We were all frustrated. You know, that was two-and-a-half years of free work for me and Adam and [writer] Rebecca Blunt. When Adam and I discussed him talking about it publicly, I said, ‘Look, do not editorialize or speculate about the why. Just say what happened, because all we know is what happened.’ The stated reason was, ‘We don’t think Ben Solo could be alive.’ And that was all we were told. And so there’s nothing to do about it, you know, except move on.”
Soderbergh continued: “I’d kind of made the movie in my head, and just felt bad that nobody else was going to get to see it. I thought the conversation was strictly going to be a practical one—where they go, what is this going to cost? And I had a really good answer for that. But it never even got to that point. It’s insane. We’re all very disappointed.”
Driver’s Ben Solo character was killed at the end of 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. And, certainly, killing off a character is a valid reason to not make a sequel focused on that character, but it’s also an issue one would think would be discussed before having Soderbergh and Driver spend years developing a script (raising, once again, the question of “Is Disney Bad at Star Wars?“).
The comments come on the heels of a new trailer for the first Star Wars film in seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu, which brings the hit Disney+ series to the big screen in May.