Why was Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars film rejected?

Ever so often, a film project – especially one that never ended up happening – emerges into the public domain to a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. So it has proved with Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars film, tentatively entitled The Hunt for Ben Solo. The picture was to have been a sequel to the little-loved The Rise of Skywalker and focused on Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia who finds himself torn between the noble impulses of the Force and the more dastardly influence of the Dark Side.

Given that Soderbergh is nobody’s idea of a conventional blockbuster director, the results would, at the very least, have been interesting. He had worked with Driver on the 2017 comedy Logan Lucky and clearly established a good rapport with him: good enough, by his account, to work with the actor on spec developing a new adventure in a galaxy far, far away. Driver called the project “one of the coolest fucking scripts I had ever been a part of” and said that, after enjoying his initial experience working on Star Wars, “I had been talking about doing another one since 2021. Kathleen [Kennedy] had reached out. I always said: ‘With a great director and a great story, I’d be there in a second.’ I loved that character and loved playing him.”

Driver described the film as “handmade and character-driven,” comparing it to The Empire Strikes Back, and, implicitly, the much-loved Andor, which was widely acclaimed for taking a series that has traditionally been aimed at children and adolescents and focusing it towards adults instead. Certainly, the Driver-Soderbergh pairing was tempting enough for Kennedy and Lucasfilm to informally greenlight the film, paying Soderbergh’s regular collaborator Scott Z. Burns $3 million to work up a screenplay (Driver and Soderbergh were unpaid) and putting the full package together for Lucasfilm’s owners Disney for their approval. And then matters went awry.

According to Driver and Soderbergh, the reaction of Disney chiefs Bob Iger and Alan Bergman was simple incomprehension. The Ren-Ben Solo character dies heroically and redemptively in The Rise of Skywalker, becoming one with the Force, and as far as Iger and Bergman were concerned, there did not need to be any further exploration of the character; any idea of his being resurrected was complete anathema to them. Kennedy and Lucasfilm were not only surprised, but upset. As Soderbergh remarked in a BlueSky post, “in the aftermath of the ‘HFBS’ situation, I asked Kathy Kennedy if LFL had ever turned in a finished movie script for greenlight to Disney and had it rejected. She said no, this was a first.”

The question as to why this has really happened has now begun to preoccupy conspiracy theorists and industry watchers alike. Development on the film – which had the working title Quiet Leaves – had begun in earnest and it was expected that it would be the next live-action Star Wars picture, following on from Ryan Gosling’s Star Wars: Starfighter, which is currently in production, and the dreadful-looking The Mandalorian & Grogu, which is being inflicted on cinemas next year. It has been suggested that the reason for the film being cancelled was because Iger, who is to step down from Disney next year, wanted to anoint Bergman as his successor and did not want there to be any potentially dicey (and expensive) outstanding projects hanging over them.

That a Star Wars film – directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker and starring one of the most popular and interesting actors working today – might even be seen as a risk says a lot about how tainted the brand has been in recent years. (It should also be noted that Soderbergh has not had a serious commercial hit since Magic Mike in 2012.) Certainly, it had the potential to be better than the ultimately underwhelming sequel trilogy (and definitely than the appalling Last Jedi), and, unsurprisingly, there is a fan campaign under way to make the film happen.

Yet Driver and Soderbergh both consider themselves relieved from the necessity of keeping schtum about the picture, which implies it has joined the ranks of intriguing unmade films that litter Hollywood, and remains a “what if” to be reckoned with. Still, we’ll always have Andor.