David Benioff and D. B. Weiss Talk About Their Cancelled ‘Star Wars’ Film
We’ve not heard much about David Benioff and D. B Weiss’ Star Wars film since reports emerged that it was cancelled back in 2019. They’ve been silent since then, but now that they’re beginning to promote their new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, they’ve started to spill some details on their cancelled project.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter (THR), they both claim that Lucasfilm rejected their pitch. Speculation at the time was that their movie was linked to either the High Republic or the Old Republic, but it turns out they actually wanted to go back even further, calling their planned movie The First Jedi.
Benioff was the one who revealed the title and teased some of the things they wanted to explore.
We wanted to do The First Jedi. Basically how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber…
[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.
Of course, this sounds a lot like James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi movie that was announced last year. It seems that Lucasfilm has been interested in exploring the origins of the Jedi Order for a while, but they didn’t like Benioff and Weiss’ script.
Perhaps that’s when they realized it was risky to offer creators the chance to make a film trilogy before seeing their ideas. The duo didn’t refer to it as a trilogy, even though that was reported at the time. It seems a look at their first film was enough for Lucasfilm to pass.
That’s all the information they could give us unfortunately, though Weiss did take a moment to joke about how similar Rian Johnson’s film title The Last Jedi was to their own, saying “He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.” Sensibly, THR points out that Benioff and Weiss are both longtime friends with Rian Johnson.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if David Benioff and D. B. Weiss revealed more information about their Star Wars movie as they continue to promote their new series. Watch this space.
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
