Can you believe it’s been years since there was a Star Wars movie in theaters? Ten years ago, we were playing the teaser for The Force Awakens on repeat. Six years ago, we all walked away deflated from The Rise of Skywalker. While there’s a Mandalorian movie on the horizon, and Starfighter with Ryan Gosling, actor Adam Driver reveals he once pitched a solo Ben Solo movie (apologies to my editor) that had almost everyone jazzed. Almost.
In a new interview with the Associated Press published on October 20, Adam Driver—while promoting his latest film Father Mother Sister Brother with director Jim Jarmusch—spilled some details about an unmade Star Wars project he spent two years developing with filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. Titled The Hunt for Ben Solo, the movie would have taken place after The Rise of Skywalker with its story hinging on unfinished business Kylo Ren had following the end of the sequel trilogy.
“I always was interested in doing another Star Wars,” Driver told Associated Press. “I had been talking about doing another one since 2021. [President of Lucasfilm] 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 revealed that he approached Soderbergh, with whom he collaborated on the 2017 film Logan Lucky, and together (with Soderbergh’s wife, a screenwriter who goes by the pseudonym Rebecca Blunt) worked on the story and concepts for The Hunt for Ben Solo. After they pitched the project to Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy, vice president Cary Beck, and chief creative officer Dave Filoni, who all warmly received the pitched, Scott Z. Burns (writer of Soderbergh’s prescient disease thriller Contagion) came aboard to write a script that Driver told AP was “one of the coolest… scripts I had ever been a part of.”
While Driver didn’t spill plot details, he described the project as being on a smaller scale than any of the trilogy films. “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,” he told AP. He added he wanted to emulate Empire Strikes Back, and hoped to pull it off with Soderbergh. “Empire Strikes Back being, in my opinion, the standard of what those movies were. But he [Soderbergh] is, to me, one of my favorite directors of all time. He lives his code, lives his ethics, doesn’t compromise.”
The project’s momentum came to a halt when the team pitched the movie to Disney’s Bob Iger and Alan Bergman. Said Driver: “We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
When reached for comment by the AP, Soderbergh told them: “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.”
These days, Star Wars is struggling to hold onto anyone’s attention. While The Mandalorian was a big hit on Disney+ and Andor has earned critical acclaim as a politically-minded espionage thriller, the rest of the franchise has floundered in the streaming era. Perhaps the franchise will turn a corner soon enough, with The Mandalorian & Grogu poised to continue the TV show in theatrical form and Starfighter set to tell a whole new story in a new corner of the Star Wars universe. James Mangold is also helming a new Star Wars feature, and Daisy Ridley will return as Rey in a spin-off movie from Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Maybe the power of the Force isn’t lost yet—it just needs to be refocused.
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