Long before its purchase by Disney, Lucasfilm was working on a TV series, Star Wars: Underworld. Producer Rick McCallum has talked about why it never happened.
Revenge Of The Sith, the last Star Wars episode directed by George Lucas himself, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. And while that 2005 film marked the end of the prequel trilogy, Lucas still had plans to expand the Star Wars universe on television.
Announced around the time of Revenge Of The Sith’s release, the TV series Star Wars: Underworld was billed as a darker, edgier take on his space fantasy saga; Lucas once described it as being “based on film noir movies of the 1940s.”
Other people who worked on the show compared its tone to sweary western series Deadwood or gangster epic, The Godfather.
With Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D Moore among its stable of writers, Star Wars: Underworld was in development for at least five years, and Lucas estimated that around 50 hours’ worth of material written for the series. So why was it never made?
Talking on the Young Indy Chronicles podcast – as reported by IndieWire – producer Rick McCallum spoke in a fair bit of detail about the live-action series that never made it past the scripting page.
“These were dark. They were sexy. They were violent,” McCallum said. “They were absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging scripts.”
Read more: Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith | The 2005 online leak that saw the FBI get involved
McCallum also said that there may have been even more material written than initially thought; 60 scripts were written, he recalled, and most had been polished and were ready to go. Ambition, it seemed, was the key issue.
“The problem was that each episode was bigger than the films,” McCallum said. “So the lowest I could get it down to with the each [instalment] that existed then was $40 million an episode.”
To put that in perspective, it’s thought that episodes of The Mandalorian cost Disney something in the region of $15m per episode to make, while pirates-in-space outing Skeleton Crew is said to have cost about $136m for its entire eight-episode run.
Factor inflation in, and $40m per episode was a huge amount of money in 2005, and would still make the increasingly cost-conscious Disney balk today.
Speaking of Disney, McCallum theorised in the podcast that, had the series been made, “it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe and Disney would have definitely never offered George to buy the franchise.”
It isn’t clear whether McCallum meant that Star Wars: Underworld would have put Disney off because of its expense or its sheer sexiness. To date, none of those 60 scripts have emerged; the plug was pulled on the project around 2010. Two years later, Disney acquired Lucasfilm for a shade over $4bn, and Underworld was quietly forgotten.
From the little we know about Underworld, it sounds as though some of its ideas eventually worked their way into Lucasfilm’s post-Disney-acquisition Star Wars output. It’s said that Boba Fett would have appeared at least once; he eventually got his own Disney+ series, The Book Of Boba Fett. An episode would also have explored how Han Solo won the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, and how he met Chewbacca; that whole origin story made its way into 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Andor, which has its second and final season set to appear on Disney+ in April, also has explores the darker underbelly of the Star Wars universe. All the same, we can only wonder what Star Wars: Underworld might have looked like; the scripts will almost certainly be knocking around in a Lucasfilm vault somewhere, but legal red tape means we’ll almost certainly never get to read them. Poodoo.
