Adam Driver spent two years developing a Star Wars movie with director Steven Sodenbergh, script-writer Scott Z. Burns, and the Lucasfilm brain trust of Kathleen Kennedy, Carrie Beck, and Dave Filoni, only to have Disney executives Bob Iger and Alan Bergman kill it.
The reasoning?
“They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive,” Driver told the Associated Press. “And that was that.”
Now, in defense of Disney for a moment, the whole trope of bringing back characters from the dead (or from what seemed to be death) is way overused at this point, both in Star Wars and in franchise storytelling in general. It seems that movies and shows don’t want to commit to any sense of finality, should that mean they wouldn’t be able to tell further stories with some of these established characters. This is a problem. So any time I hear talk about Star Wars bringing a character back from the dead, I am always initially skeptical. In defense of Disney, I think it’s good that there is a certain level of caution from them on this.
But here’s the thing: their caution is laughably hypocritical, and not consistently applied whatsoever. See, it would be one thing if they just didn’t want to do a Ben Solo story. That would be dumb, but at least understandable. But to turn the project down because they just didn’t understand how he would be alive is short-sighted.
Consider some of the major stories that the Star Wars franchise has been focusing on more recently:
- The most recent theatrical film that they released, The Rise of Skywalker, was all about bringing a major character back from what was presumed to be death, as somehow, Emperor Palpatine returned.
- The main Star Wars narrative right now is The Mandalorian and its connected stories, and they have brought back a few characters from the ‘dead’. In 2020 they re-introduced Boba Fett in The Mandalorian season two, revealing that he survived the sarlaac pit. No explanation was given then, but in 2021 The Book of Boba Fett was released, filling in some details.
- One of the main shows right now for Star Wars is Ahsoka, which centers on Ahsoka Tano. Though she never really died, it gets rather complicated: it certainly appeared like she died, but Dave Filoni brought her back with an elaborate explanation about how the world between worlds was used to save her out of it. Now, she is one of the leading figures of this new era of Star Wars.
- Next year, Lucasfilm animation will release their newest show, Maul – Shadow Lord. The series is all about Maul – a character who famously was cut in half in The Phantom Menace. This was about as clear as a death scene can possibly get… until George Lucas decided to bring him back in The Clone Wars. Maul’s characterization since then has been terrific, so much so that now he’s headlining a brand new animated series.
Here is the point: some of the most notable characters that Star Wars has focused on in recent years, in some of their most notable projects, have been about characters once dead. Which means that the issue isn’t so much bringing characters back, but doing it well. This is why Palpatine’s return in The Rise of Skywalker didn’t sit right with many people. It wasn’t the fact that he was back – that story had deep precedent in Legends material, for a long time. It was the fact that his return was barely acknowledged, save for the widely panned “somehow Palpatine returned” line (I’ve actually defended that as a legitimate in-universe line here, but that’s for another time). This much has been proven: give Star Wars fans a good enough story, and a reasonable enough explanation, and they’ll widely embrace the return of a character once-dead. The issue, again, isn’t bringing them back; it’s how they explain bringing them back.
The fact that Driver wanted a movie titled The Hunt for Ben Solo suggests to me that the movie was going to be all about how Ben Solo survived. It’s quite different to do it as a throwaway line that doesn’t get any exposition versus being the main plot driver of the movie. The fact that the actor, director, script-writer, and brain trust at the studio (you know, the people whose job it is to develop Star Wars stories and keep them consistent) all thought it was a good explanation carries weight.
But Disney saying no reveals that they aren’t really all that interested in stories that take risks or that make these decisions themselves. They’ve shown that they have no problem profiting off of characters who were once-dead and now have been brought back, but it appears they don’t really know how to do that themselves. The Hunt for Ben Solo not being made is disappointing, but the bigger disappointment is that Disney shut it down because of their lack of creativity, all the while being quite content to make money from other characters they’ve already brought back from the dead.
There’s finally a Star Wars movie that seems fresh, interesting, bold, and risk-taking – and Disney wants nothing to do with it. That, more than anything else, is a concern for this franchise’s future.
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