There’s no word yet on if Obi-Wan Kenobi will return to Disney+ for more seasons, but apparently the stories are there. In a new interview, writer Stuart Beattie explained that the original plan for Obi-Wan Kenobi was to make three movies, and the story on the first season of the show was just part one.
Beattie is credited as a writer on episodes one and three of the Disney+ show, and given story credit for episodes one, two, and six. Despite that, he never had any interaction with anyone involved with the show. How can that be? Well, it’s because Beattie, who also wrote Collateral and 30 Days of Night among others, wrote a screenplay for an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie that was going to be directed by Stephen Daldry. A movie that got scrapped in favour of a streaming show, but still ended up very much being a part of that streaming show.
“I wrote the film that they based the show on,” Beattie said to the Direct. “So, yeah. I spent like a year, year-and-a-half working on it. And then, when the decision was made not to make any more spin-off films after Solo came out, I left the project and went on to other things. Joby [Harold] came on and took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six. So, I did not work with them at all, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff.”
And that stuff was just the beginning. Beattie originally pitched Lucasfilm something very epic: a new Star Wars trilogy. “So when I pitched my Obi-Wan story to Lucasfilm, I said, ‘There’s actually three stories here. Because there’s three different evolutions that the character has to make in order to go from Obi-Wan to Ben,’” Beattie said. “And the first one was the first movie, which was the show, which was, ‘Surrender to the will of the Force. Transport your will, surrender your will. Leave the kid alone.’”
“So then, the second [movie] was thinking about where Kenobi ends up,” the writer continued. “And one of the most powerful and probably the most powerful moment in all of Obi-Wan’s story is that moment where he sacrifices himself in A New Hope. Great moment, you know, makes you cry. But, if you stop and think about it, it’s a pretty sudden thing, to just kind of go be fighting a guy, to see Luke and go, ‘I’m gonna die.’ You know, that to me, that required forethought. That required pre-acceptance that this was going to happen.”
Beattie is right in that assessment. The show doesn’t quite give you a full picture of why Obi-Wan, in his next (we think) duel with Vader, lets himself be killed. Is it because Luke and Leia have been reunited and he’s spent years training for this with Qui-Gon? Probably. But that’s implicit, not explicit.
The interview at the Direct gets a bit more into that, with Beattie thinking that story — of how Obi-Wan realised he’d have to die — is actually just movie two of his trilogy. He never actually wrote those films though because he was worried about getting part one off the ground. Which it eventually did, just not in the way he wanted.
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