It says something about the state of Star Wars that the franchise’s most discussed project of late is one that does not, and will never, exist.
On-screen Star Wars has hibernated since Andor ended in May. Season 2 of the only ongoing live-action series (Ahsoka) doesn’t yet have a debut date. Almost six years have elapsed since the last Star Wars movie, and seven more months will pass before The Mandalorian and Grogu premieres. (Starfighter, the next movie not adapted from TV, is slated to arrive a year after that.) In light of that extended theatrical drought and the prevailing pessimism surrounding Star Wars streaming, perhaps it’s only natural that fans would fixate on something aspirational. Enter Adam Driver. With apologies to the newly released third season of anime anthology Visions, the hottest topic in Star Wars is the mostly imaginary movie Driver just revealed: The Hunt for Ben Solo.
The sequel trilogy star sparked a firestorm of Star Wars speculation and recrimination last week when, instead of letting the past die, he revealed a Star Wars passion project that was never allowed to live. Per an AP report, Driver understandably felt unfulfilled by his character Kylo Ren’s arc in the trilogy, which culminated in Kylo/Ben Solo’s redemption and death in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. And so, undeterred by the fact that Solo sacrificed his own life to resurrect Rey, the actor “took a concept” for a post–Rise of Skywalker, Solo-centered film to director-writer Steven Soderbergh, who outlined the story with his wife, screenwriter Jules Asner (whose nom de plume is Rebecca Blunt).
The couple pitched a trio of Lucasfilm bigwigs—president Kathleen Kennedy, executive vice president Carrie Beck, and chief creative officer Dave Filoni—and the idea went over well. The big-picture people then outsourced the script to Scott Z. Burns, who had written several previous Soderbergh movies (The Informant!, Contagion, Side Effects, The Laundromat) and the Driver vehicle The Report, in addition to taking an uncredited pass at a script for Rogue One. The result, Driver said, was “one of the coolest fucking scripts I had ever been a part of.” The film was on the fast track … until it was time to get the green light from Disney.
“We presented the script to Lucasfilm,” Driver said. “They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it. We took it to [CEO] Bob Iger and [cochairman of Disney Entertainment] Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
The movie may have ended there, but the discourse about it didn’t. Instead, it was stoked by Soderbergh. “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head,” he told the AP. “I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.” Later, on Bluesky, he posted, “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.”
Although a subsequent piece at The Playlist downplayed the possibility that Driver and Soderbergh were trying to pull a Ryan Reynolds and drum up popular support to pressure the studio into making their movie, the reports incited a great disturbance in the fan base. The sensational sequence described by Driver and Soderbergh—and thus far unburdened by Disney’s side of the story—offered ample fodder for a fan campaign. Acclaimed creators! Coolest script! Unprecedented rejection! The Playlist specified that the movie “is classified internally as ‘dead.’” But sometimes in Star Wars, the dead speak—and this project spoke loudly and carried a big script.
Since Star Wars fans’ brains don’t take orders from a central control computer, their reactions ran the gamut from unruffled to irate. But the dominant sentiment was seemingly something like: How dare Disney deprive us of this cinematic masterpiece!? Star Wars is truly dead.
I’m not here to tell you to tear down your billboards on Broadway or stop hiring planes to pull banners above Disney Studios. Would I want to watch a Soderbergh spin on Star Wars? Heck, yes! Might the movie have been as good as Driver advertised? Sure! Could this be the latest symptom of the franchise’s demise? Maybe! But it’s easier to mourn an imaginary movie than to make a worthwhile one. And Disney may have had a point.
During Disney’s stewardship of Star Wars, fans have become accustomed to creative turmoil, scrapped plans, and, on occasion, leaks or comments about alternate paths that provoke a keen sense of regret. (I actually like Solo, but I still wonder what might’ve been had Lucasfilm opted to #ReleaseTheLordAndMillerCut.) Someday, additional details about The Hunt for Ben Solo—or the script itself—may surface. (My requests for further information from reps for Disney and Soderbergh went unanswered.) At present, though, we know less about the project than we do about, say, Colin Trevorrow’s scuttled take on Episode IX.
More on Kylo Ren
We know, via Driver, that the would-be moviemakers were planning for the production to be “economical,” “handmade,” and “character-driven,” in the spirit of The Empire Strikes Back. We know that there was plenty of talent attached and that everyone except the Disney suits seemed to be excited. And we know that somehow, Solo returned in the script. That’s not nothing.
But it is also not enough to say with certainty whether Disney made a mistake, considering how many major questions are still unanswered. Such as: How did the movie justify its protagonist’s survival? Who or what was hunting him, and why? (Was he hiding out and guzzling green milk on Ahch-To, too?) What was the movie’s vision for the galaxy (and the rest of the sequel trilogy’s core characters) after the First Order? Would Ben have been boring compared with Kylo? And, perhaps most pressing, where does Soderbergh stand re: Reylo?
One common criticism of Disney in recent days has been the apparent hypocrisy of killing a movie over the minor matter of its main character having previously perished. (Assuming there really wasn’t more to Disney’s “no” than “They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive.”) After all, Emperor Palpatine popped up in The Rise of Skywalker (albeit after his spirit was transferred into a clone body). Palpy is one of a few prominent characters in Star Wars who were strongly implied to have died, only to be brought back years later, a group that also includes Darth Maul, Boba Fett, and Asajj Ventress. And that’s not counting comebacks via Force ghosts or characters whose plot armor improbably prevented them from dying in the first place. Star Wars doesn’t play as fast and loose with life and death as Marvel and DC do, but it's not the strictest stickler for that kind of continuity. Surely the manual for Force dyads says something about second lives?
In Disney’s defense, undoing the stakes of a previous story to restore a fan favorite hasn’t always served Star Wars well—and changing one’s mind in response to new info (and fan feedback) isn’t inherently hypocritical. The Rise of Skywalker made the movie franchise radioactive in no small part because the Emperor reappeared, which some considered to be unnatural (not to mention unoriginal). Doubling—no, tripling—down on the decision to resurrect a dark sider could have been throwing good movie after bad. A character’s climactic death should be an impediment to structuring more movies around them, even if the creators come up with a good trick to satisfy the keepers of canon. As feedback from studio executives goes, “Wait, didn’t this dude just die?” is not a terrible note.
It’s also, quite possibly, something Soderbergh needed to hear. According to his annual, comprehensive lists of the media he consumed in the preceding year, Soderbergh saw The Force Awakens in early 2016 and The Last Jedi days after its release in 2017. But per his own records, he somehow (there’s that word again) still hasn’t seen The Rise of Skywalker! Granted, I wish I hadn’t seen The Rise of Skywalker, either—maybe he blocked it out from his memory?—but it does seem like something one might want to watch before developing an idea for a sequel. Might Soderbergh have written a sequel starring Ben Solo because he missed the movie with Solo’s death scene?
I concede that this is unlikely. (Although if it’s all true, I could certainly see why Disney might have balked at his script.) For one thing, you’d think that Driver or the leaders of Lucasfilm might’ve mentioned it to him. Perhaps Soderbergh’s recordkeeping isn’t perfect, and The Rise of Skywalker slipped through the cracks. But I’m tickled by the thought that he’s still boycotting the conclusion of the Skywalker saga, especially considering that he found time to watch The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones two times each last year.
Regardless of whether Soderbergh has seen The Rise of Skywalker, maybe The Hunt for Ben Solo could have redeemed Rise the way Rise tried to redeem Ren. But much as Palpatine’s part in Episode IX seemed to rob Return of the Jedi of some of its ending’s oomph, Ben’s role in Soderbergh’s follow-up could have blunted the impact of one of the few things The Rise of Skywalker did well. Solo’s selfless sacrifice to save someone he loved—which Ben’s granddad Darth Vader, to his horror, couldn’t do with Padmé—was one of the most thematically satisfying aspects of the sequel capper, however rushed Ren’s redemption arc was.
And for better or worse, Disney has, at least, been consistent about staying away from the period that follows the First Order’s defeat. I’m not necessarily opposed to more (more!) stories about Vader’s angsty grandson; in fact, my favorite Star Wars media from 2025, Andor excluded, is an ongoing comic called Legacy of Vader that details Kylo’s misadventures between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. And I do find it frustrating that so much Star Wars storytelling is confined to the years between trilogies or during the same few films.
But Star Wars did desperately need some sort of reset after the fallout from the sequels and their diminishing box-office returns. In September 2020, as fan unrest roiled and spectators and creators alike relitigated where Episode IX had gone wrong, I complained, “People keep picking at my Rise of Skywalker scab.” All these years later, that wound keeps reopening, whether through revelations like Driver’s or the almost monthly rehashing of John Boyega’s (mostly legitimate) gripes about the sequels. (Somebody, please put Boyega in another movie immediately and ask him about that one instead.)
In an effort to hasten the healing (or just do damage control), Disney has drawn a bright line around the end of the sequel era. Only last week did the franchise finally produce a story set after (and descended from) The Rise of Skywalker—and that yarn, a young-adult novel called The Last Order that follows Finn and Jannah, is mostly made up of flashbacks from before the film’s events.
Of course, Disney has essentially exchanged sins of commission for sins of omission: Wariness about making more mistakes seems to have frozen the franchise. A slowdown is a reasonable response to oversaturation, but it’s hard for fans to move on from The Rise of Skywalker when it’s still the last word in big-screen Star Wars storytelling. I’m not a Disney doomer, but when it comes to picking up where the sequels left off, the Mouse hasn’t managed any more than concepts of a plan.
Thus, Disney and Lucasfilm have nobody to blame but themselves for the uproar over a movie that never made it past preproduction. Fans wouldn’t be pining for vaporware if Lucasfilm and Disney were giving them more movies—or any movies—to erase the bitter taste of Episode IX. As it is, the opportunity cost of seeing whether Soderbergh had another Empire Strikes Back up his sleeve seems low. What was the downside, if the alternative is continued confusion and delays?
Someone like Soderbergh, a quick-working auteur who’s shown a knack for merging indie experimentation with big-budget polish across a wide range of genres, seems like a strong candidate to deliver a singular slice of Star Wars and scratch that Andor itch. (Although they can’t all be Andor.) The Hunt for Ben Solo might not be my pet project, but based purely on premise, a prequel to Rogue One focused on Cassian Andor didn’t initially sound so hot to me, either. Sometimes you just have to put the right people in place and let them cook; trust the process, if you’ll forgive the phrase. How bad could a Star Wars film from an Oscar-winning director with Soderbergh’s filmography, featuring an Oscar-nominated actor with Driver’s résumé, have turned out to be? Entrusting Star Wars to directors with track records as uneven as Simon Kinberg’s or Shawn Levy’s carries risks of its own, even if they stay away from the forbidden part of the timeline.
As it happens, The Hunt for Ben Solo’s cancellation wasn’t the first time Soderbergh had been stymied by Star Wars. In 1984, five years before his feature-length directorial debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, a young Soderbergh sent a sample of his work to George Lucas, hoping for a break. But the tape was returned to him, along with a letter of rejection. That was probably a blow at the time, but in retrospect, life likely worked out better for Soderbergh than it would have if Lucas had hired him. There’s probably a lesson in that.
I feel for the fans who’ve been wishcasting about Disney decanonizing the sequel trilogy (not happening) or dusting off the script to The Hunt for Ben Solo and turning it into the triumph that saves big-screen Star Wars (probably not happening, either). Maybe Luke’s line from The Last Jedi—“No one’s ever really gone”—applies to mothballed movie scripts, too. But be careful when you cry over spilled Star Wars and fantasize about Ben being raised from the dead, à la Rey. The flawed reality likely wouldn’t live up to the idyllic dream. And in that case (to echo Anakin), we’d be haunted by the script that Disney should never have given us.
As Ahsoka’s Baylan Skoll said when asked whether he missed the Jedi order, “I miss … the idea of it. But not the truth, the weakness. There was no future there.” I miss the idea of the sequel trilogy, as it was when we watched the final trailer for The Force Awakens 10 years ago this month. But the franchise’s future lies elsewhere.
