It appeared to have just about everything going for it, yet Disney killed The Hunt For Ben Solo last year. A look at the Star Wars film we’ll almost certainly never get to see… NB: The following contains spoilers for The Rise Of Skywalker. Just so you know. In an uneven trilogy of sequels, Adam ... The Hunt For Ben Solo | The Star Wars movie that never was
It appeared to have just about everything going for it, yet Disney killed The Hunt For Ben Solo last year. A look at the Star Wars film we’ll almost certainly never get to see…
NB: The following contains spoilers for The Rise Of Skywalker. Just so you know.
In an uneven trilogy of sequels, Adam Driver’s performance as Kylo Ren remained a charismatic high point. Brooding, petulant, constantly simmering with rage, Kylo could have been a stock villain but, thanks to Driver’s talent, emerged as something more than a cookie cutter replacement for Darth Vader.
In fact, Kylo Ren was like a walking, talking summation of the problem director JJ Abrams and his team faced when making 2015’s The Force Awakens. He’s a villain living in the shadow of what came before; Kylo longs to be as feared and admired as Vader once was, but struggles to carve out a true identity for himself.
Over the course of the two subsequent films, Kylo Ren wrestled with his affections for heroine Rey (Daisy Ridley) in 2017’s The Last Jedi, killed Supreme Leader Snoke and took over his regime, before finding redemption and sacrificing himself in the effort to destroy Emperor Palpatine in 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker.
Star Wars fans may have been divided over the relative merits of that movie, but again, Driver was arguably one of the best things in it. While the sequels felt like they were at war with themselves, Driver seemed perfectly at home in his role as the evil Kylo, even as the stories shifted beneath his feet.
In an interview with the actor that came out around the release of The Rise Of Skywalker, the actor recalled what JJ Abrams had told him about the concept behind Kylo. Where Darth Vader was all-powerful at the start of the original trilogy, only to reveal his vulnerable side in the third film, Abrams wanted Kylo to be the opposite.
As originally planned, Kylo would, Driver said, be “Someone who starts the most vulnerable and the most susceptible, and gradually becomes more and more hardened with experience – he gets deeper and deeper into the Dark Side.”
Those plans were evidently dropped at some point in the 2010s, and Kylo was given a more standard redemption arc in which he reverted back to his birth name, Ben Solo.
After the sequel trilogy ground to a close, Driver was evidently keen to explore the character further. Because, as he revealed last October, the actor worked for approximately two years on a spin-off film – The Hunt For Ben Solo. It was to be directed by Ocean’s 11 filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, and would have taken place after The Rise Of Skywalker – its story somehow having found a means of bringing Ben back from the hereafter.
“I always was interested in doing another Star Wars,” Driver told Associated Press at the time. “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.”
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What happened next was rather mind-boggling. Driver and Soderbergh, having worked on an outline together with writer Rebecca Blunt (Soderbergh’s wife, who wrote Logan Lucky), then got screenwriter Scott Z Burns to complete the script. Burns had previously worked on the likes of Contagion and Side Effects with Soderbergh, and was said to have been paid $3m for his efforts.
Driver clearly loved the resulting screenplay, calling it “one of the coolest” he’d ever been involved in; Kathleen Kennedy and Dave Filoni, then the execs in charge of Lucasfilm, also approved of it. The project had a greenlight, but it needed final approval, seemingly, from Lucasfilm’s overlords at Disney.
Bob Iger and Alan Bergman, respectively, Disney’s president and chairman at the time, looked over The Hunt For Ben Solo and, bizarrely, rejected it.
“They said no,” Driver said. “They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
According to The Playlist, the film was so close to going ahead that staff were already being hired ready for its production. Design work had begun. Lucasfilm already had a budget and a proposed start date for filming ready – as well as Burns’ completed script (as history has proven, it’s not uncommon for major films to begin filming without one of these).
The Playlist’s reporting also echoes Driver’s commont that Iger and Bergman were unconvinced by the idea that Ben Solo could come back from the dead. Given that the same franchise is filled with Force ghosts, and characters like Boba Fett, Darth Maul and Palpatine all surviving brushes with the grim reaper, it seems like an odd misgiving to have.
Iger and Bergman’s disinterest seems even more strange given the kind of project they had sitting in front of them. Soderbergh is a rare director whose work straddles both intelligent, actor-led pieces and crowd-pleasing thrills; he’s been adept at making heist movies like Ocean’s or Logan Lucky as he has taut, interior films like Unsane or Black Bag; his 2002 adaptation of Stanislav Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris wasn’t a hit, but I’d argue that it was one Soderbergh’s most underrated films.
Although we don’t know the contents of Burns’ finished script, Driver told AP that it would have been “economical,” “handmade” and “character driven,” and in some way inspired by The Empire Strikes Back.
“We wanted to be [judicious] about how to spend money and be economical with it,” Driver said, “and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven,” Driver says. “Empire Strikes Back being, in my opinion, the standard of what those movies were. But he is, to me, one of my favorite directors of all time.”
With the project summarily executed by Disney, Driver went ahead and talked to journalists about it – leading to a multi-pronged fan campaign to have the film greenlit again. Messages were towed throught he sky from the backs of planes. Billboards appeared in New York’s Times Square, begging Disney to change its mind.
To date, there’s no obvious sign that those pleas have reached the Mouse House’s ears. Earlier in April, Soderberg seemed resigned to the idea that The Hunt For Ben Solo will never happen, arguing that, “If it was gonna happen, it would have happened. It’s that simple.”
This isn’t to say there aren’t a few shreds of hope to cling onto, though. Bob Iger stepped down as Disney CEO in March, his replacement being Josh D’Amaro. Alan Bergman also appears to have been moved down the pecking order a bit during a corporate reshuffle; he’ll now report to Dana Walden, who’s the chief creative officer overseeing film and TV – something gossip-mongers have said Bergman is less than happy about.
A change in the guard at Disney could make it easier for a project like The Hunt For Ben Solo to be revived – assuming everyone involved still wants to make it. The script hasn’t leaked online yet, which could help its chances. There’s clearly an appetite for such a spin-off, if the reaction among fans on the web is anything to go by.
And while Soderbergh says he’s mentally moved on from the Ben Solo project, he’s also indicated that, after making several smaller movies in a row, he’s interested in making something bigger again. Talking to Variety ahead of the release of his new drama, The Christophers, Soderbergh said:
“I want to find something that has scale, because it’s been a while since I’ve made a movie of real size, and has a hook that gets people to go to the theaters in big numbers. I want to find something that I can event-ize, that I also love.”
A Star Wars spin-off like The Hunt For Ben Solo would certainly be an event film of real size, and one that would surely get people to visit their local cinema. So as unlikely as it is that Soderbergh and Driver’s Star Wars project will happen now, it could – possibly, hopefully – be something that gets revisited in the future.
To quote Ben Solo’s dad, “Never tell me the odds.”
