With a much-anticipated sci-fi project coming soon—Netflix’s 3 Body Problem series—creative partners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are reflecting back on a different, equally anticipated sci-fi project they never ended up making. In 2019, Disney revealed the Game of Thrones showrunners were working on a Star Wars movie, and now they’re finally divulging what that scrapped movie would’ve been about.
It seems the rumors that emerged after the pair’s exit (which came just six months after their Star Wars alliance was announced) were true. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Benioff said, “We wanted to do The First Jedi. Basically how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber.”
Added Weiss, with sarcasm implied, “And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson, the duo’s longtime friend and 3BP producer] called his movie The Last Jedi. He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.”
This aligns with the reports from 2019, when Variety uncovered “Benioff and Weiss had ambitious plans to take the Star Wars universe in a new direction, one that would exist apart from the Skywalker family saga that comprised the franchise’s centerpiece nine-film series. The Star Wars period the pair was interested in exploring was how the Jedi came to exist.” The reason for the pair’s exit, it was explained at the time, was that “Lucasfilm executives and the creators begin to see their visions for the films diverge,” and the small fact that the pair had, not long after the end of Game of Thrones and their Star Wars announcement, signed a huge deal with Netflix.
Benioff had more insight to share in today’s THR story: “[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.”
Curiously, as the trade notes—and fans have no doubt already picked up on—Lucasfilm currently has a “First Jedi” movie in the works now, James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi. Speaking to io9 last year, Mangold (who’s already in at Lucasfilm, having just made Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) teased his “idea about going backward—really far backward … For me, it’s about, I want to be part of the saga, but I also don’t want to be holding so much lore in the air that you can hardly tell a story. And what I really wanted to do … was make a kind of the Ten Commandments of the Force … a kind of origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.” How that idea differs from the “very specific story” Benioff and Weiss had in mind is unknown, but it seems Mangold’s pitch is one Lucasfilm felt more confident in backing.
3 Body Problem arrives March 21 on Netflix; Dawn of the Jedi does not yet have a release date.
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