Summary
- Star Wars moved from a theatrical release to a Disney+ IP, learning from The Mandalorian’s success.
- A canceled project called Star Wars: Underworld aimed to be dark, sexy, and violent.
- Despite being risky due to high production costs, there is still hope for Star Wars to transition to a more mature direction.
Star Wars has made the transition to being a television franchise over the last few years, and as the IP gears up for a return to the big screen, fans get a retrospective on what could have been the franchise’s first (and vastly different) medium switch.
Star Wars started on and shone bright on the big screen for the majority of its existence, being to theatrical releases what Doctor Who and Star Trek were to television. This would eventually change after the sequel trilogy, with the franchise moving to primarily be a Disney+ IP thanks to the path forged by The Mandalorian. Several years and shows later, the franchise is now poised to once more make a shift in medium led once more by The Mandalorian & Grogu, and the streaming era has been so prominent that the coming Star Wars movies can learn from the TV and streaming series.
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While Andor has set itself apart on Disney+ in part by being a more gritty and mature take on the franchise, fans almost got something a lot more potent. In the audio clip made available by Young Indy Chroniclers on YouTube, the eponymous podcast hosted Star Wars producer Rick McCallum and the exec gave some details about Star Wars: Underworld, a failed George Lucas project that the franchise creator and a large team worked on for ABC. “I think we had over 60 scripts, third draft scripts [with] the most wonderful writers in the world,” McCallum revealed. “…and these were dark, they were sexy, they were violent, just absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging… It would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe, and Disney definitely would have never offered to buy that. It’s one of the great disappointments of our lives.” These details are truly eye-opening for fans, many of whom were unaware that the show’s concepts even existed.
McCallum, who was attached to the project alongside many others between 2010 and the show’s cancelation in 2012 during the Disney purchase, also revealed why the project never took off.“The problem was each episode was bigger than the films,” he explained, “so the lowest I could get it down to with the technology that existed then was about $40 million an episode.” While this sounds like a major loss, it was also a risky prospect. The show sounds conceptually similar to the Star Wars movie that Zack Snyder tried to get made around the same period when Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, which eventually came to fans as his Rebel Moon franchise. That exercise over at Netflix serves as compelling proof that Disney canning that film was the right choice, and might even be indicative of how Star Wars: Underworld would have played out if it came to screens without some sort of buffer. No matter how much fans might age, the idea that such a drastic switch in tone could be good for a franchise seems misguided at best and reckless at worst.
While that opportunity is long gone now, there’s still hope for the franchise to touch on something similar with some proper planning and intentionality. There are an abundance of stories in the Legends continuity that are more mature and should be made Star Wars canon to transition the franchise in a more adult direction in increments. While there’s certainly a reality where fans are ready for Star Wars: Underworld straight off of the prequel trilogy, it’s not this one and that hasn’t changed much with the sequels. If Disney is willing to prove McCallum wrong, there’s definitely a way to go.
The Star Wars franchise is available to stream on Disney+.
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Source: Young Indy Chroniclers/YouTube