Disney axed a Star Wars film about the redemption of Ben Solo

File this under a bit of unexpected news: speaking with the Associated Press last week, actor Adam Driver revealed that he had been working with director Steven Soderbergh on a new Star Wars film called The Hunt for Ben Solo. It would have put a new spin on his sequel trilogy character Kylo Ren, appears to have been on the verge of entering production, only to be canceled by Disney.

Driver told the AP that he "always was interested in doing another ‘Star Wars,’” and that Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy began talking with him about the possibility of a return in 2021, a couple of years after the studio released The Rise of Skywalker. Driver had worked with Soderbergh in 2016's Logan Lucky and brought the idea of a post-ROTS film to him, with the idea that they could build a new story that gave him a better ending.

According to Soderbergh this wasn't a it was a finished script that appears as though it was ready to go into production before it was killed. The Playlist reports that Lucasfilm had greenlit the film and had been working on getting it prepared for production when it was canceled: "Kennedy and the 'Star Wars' Story Group waited until the project was 'ready to shoot' before they presented it to Disney."

Driver appeared in all three of the sequel trilogy films as Kylo Ren, who we learn in The Force Awakens that he's really the fallen son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. In The Last Jedi, we learned that he had been training with his uncle, Luke Skywalker, and that Luke had almost killed him after realizing the extent of his powers and that he'd been communicating with Supreme Leader Snoke. Ben fell to the Dark Side and adopted the mantle of Kylo Ren, destroying Luke's academy, and then went on to help the First Order begin its takeover of the galaxy.

Kylo kills Han in The Force Awakens, and struggles with a strange bond that he forms with Rey, who's met up with the Resistance. He tries to tempt her to his side, and they ultimately kill Snoke and destroy a good part of the First Order fleet, only for Kylo to turn on her rather than turn his back on the Dark Side and First Order, and ends up trying to kill Luke.

The sequel trilogy had a convoluted production: J.J. Abrams directed The Force Awakens, and Rian Johnson picked up from where he left off with The Last Jedi. But there doesn't appear to have been any overarching direction or destination for the trilogy and its characters, and Johnson he took the story in his own direction, upending fan expectations. Colin Trevorrow was tapped to conclude the trilogy with Episode 9 (titled Duel of the Fates), but dropped out late over creative differences, prompting Abrams to step back in and take over, starting the film over from scratch. The film ultimately sees Kylo Ren turning his back on the dark side and becoming Ben Solo once again, and ends up aiding her when she tracks down the clone of Emperor Palpatine and saves her life at the cost of his own.

It's a jarring transition, because Abrams goes back on a bunch of things that Johnson left off with, and as a result, the legacy of the sequel trilogy, this enormous film project that should have capped off nearly a half-century of filmmaking and storytelling, feels really uneven, in no small part because nobody seems to have really figured out how to give their characters satisfying arcs after building them up for two films.

The AP notes that Driver was unsatisfied with how Kylo's arc turned out after that process (something that plenty of fans and reviewers also noted) and this new project was designed to give a better sense of closure for the character. Soderbergh and his wife Jules Asner (who writes under the name Rebecca Blunt), produced a concept, pitched it to Lucasfilm and its various creatives, then hired screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, Contagion, and provided rewrites for the script for Rogue One) to write the screenplay, before taking it to to Lucasfilm, who reportedly loved it. Driver also was apparently thrilled with the concept.

When Lucasfilm brought it to Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Co-chairman Alan Bergman, they nixed it, apparently because they didn't see how Ben Solo could be brought back, something that The Playlist notes took Lucasfilm by surprise, because the film explains it. (Never mind that Palpatine returned from the dead for Rise of Skywalker)

There's not a lot that we know about the timing of all of this, and I have to wonder (and I'm just guessing/extrapolating here) that it's less Disney executives being unable to wrap their heads around a dead character returning to life but more the state of the film industry. If work on the film started in 2021 and ran for two years, that would put it right in the midst of the time that streaming was just starting to falter and where Bob Iger returned to Disney after the company dismissed his replacement/predecessor, Bob Chapek. The Playlist report, if it's accurate, suggests that some think film was killed because of company politics.

Changes on the executive level can often kill films that have been in the works under previous administrations, and I wonder if Disney was still at that point betting on streaming being a priority over theatrical films.

There are also a lot of moving parts in the post-sequel era for the franchise: the Rey film was announced in 2023 (so presumably there had been some work on it while the Ben Solo film was in the works), and it feels plausible to me that this could be an instance where the executives simply decided to move ahead on one project over another.

The project appears to be completely dead, and Lucasfilm has since greenlight a couple of other scripts (The Mandalorian and Grogu is coming out next year, and Star Wars: Starfighter is due out in 2027), while they're also developing a handful of other projects: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's post-sequel Rey film, Simon Kinsburg's post-sequel trilogy, as well as film projects by Taika Waititi, James Mangold, and Patty Jenkins. I'm sure there are others as well that haven't been reported on.

What's also frustrating is that for years, Lucasfilm had been announcing projects at some pretty early stages, only to have them killed. I don't think that word of this project had leaked before, so it's refreshing to see that the studio was getting everything lined up and ready to go before saying something about it. Hopefully that's the approach moving forward.

It's obviously difficult to say whether or not this film would have worked out well for Disney had it gone into production. Frustratingly, Driver told the AP that they were trying to put together a cheaper film: "we wanted to be judicial about how to spend money and be economical with it, and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven."

Considering that the sequel trilogy installments ranged from $300 million (The Last Jedi) to more than $400 million (The Rise of Skywalker), economical might not mean much, but given how expensive blockbuster films are and how that's raised the bar for these sorts of films to be improbably successful in theaters, it's a welcome approach.

But it's also a story that would have come at the tail end of the sequel trilogy, which (as noted above), had an uneven reception amongst fans and critics alike. I tend to sit on the wait-and-see fence when it comes to a film's legacy – 25 years after it was released, the prequel trilogy has been enjoying this delightful renaissance and reevaluation amongst fans, and I have little doubt that with the same distance, we'll see the sequel trilogy enjoy a similar reception, especially when additional stories told through books, comics, games, and TV shows come together to shore up the weaker points and to fill in plot holes.

Even now, a dedicated segment of fandom that's focused on the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren (Reylos), have been clamoring for additional stories about the two characters, and this certainly feels like a project that they would have embraced. At the same time, there's a feeling in the air that Lucasfilm is trying to put some of the experiences of the sequel trilogy behind them, and have set their sights on stories that'll continue the franchise beyond the Skywalker storyline, with the idea being that there are other parts of the world to explore: the immediate years after Rise of Skywalker saw the release of shows like Ahsoka, Andor, The Mandalorian and Skeleton Crew, none of which really connect to the sequel trilogy (although there are points where they do appear to be setting the stage for it), and while one of the upcoming films is set in the post-sequel world, it seems like it's designed for a fresh start.

Star Wars can do both of those things, but I think the impulse to try and see what other stories they can tell in this world is probably a better one. Most of Disney's entries in the franchise really feel like they're looking backward: Solo was an origin story that few were asking for, Ahsoka was a streaming series that picked up the characters featured in the animated series Rebels, and Rogue One told the story in the days before A New Hope. There are good entries in there – look no further than Andor and Rogue One, which really changed what I thought Star Wars could do, but while I liked Solo a great deal, these aren't projects that really feel as though they're expanding the world and doing anything other than retreading over old ground.

I can't know without seeing the script, but I have a hard time seeing what The Hunt for Ben Solo could do to the larger world in that light: it's another project that's designed to shore up the existing stories. It's certainly possible that it could have been something that would have drastically reevaluated what a Star Wars film could be, like Johnson's The Last Jedi or Tony Gilroy's Andor did for me, but it could have easily also just been another Solo or Ahsoka; projects that ultimately ended up feeling like they were designed for and catered to a specific subset of Star Wars fandom, rather than being a good story worthy of being shot because it was a good story. I don't actually think it would be quite that drastic: Soderbergh is an excellent director, but it's one of those things that's impossible to tell.

This entire saga has been fascinating to watch since it popped up last week: I can't think of a time when we've seen creatives go out and talk about a killed project like this, and it's interesting because it pulls the curtain back a little on the process to get one of these films made. It's certainly generated quite a bit of attention from fans, who hired a plane to fly around Disney's headquarters with a message pleading for the film to be saved. I don't think that'll work and I think that the film is probably never going to happen, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.