Disney had a finished Star Wars script from an Oscar-winning director and its own leading man, and it killed the movie over a plot detail this franchise has ignored a dozen times before. That is not risk management. That is a studio mistaking a preference for a rule.
Adam Driver made the case in one sentence, on the press tour for James Gray’s Paper Tiger. “For me it was: Steven Soderbergh wants to make a ‘Star Wars’ film. What are we debating?” he told the Associated Press.
The answer he got back: “They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
Three reasons that answer does not hold up.
The rule they cited is not a rule. This franchise has revived Darth Maul, Boba Fett and Emperor Palpatine after each of them died on screen, as Deadline pointed out while covering the fan campaign. Resurrection is standard equipment in this universe. Ben Solo, the last Skywalker by blood, is apparently the one character who cannot come back. A studio gets to decide it prefers him dead. It does not get to call that decision due diligence.
It was never a verdict on the man playing him, either. Marvel announced in August that Driver plays Mr. Sinister in the next X-Men film, out May 5, 2028. Disney wants this actor in a franchise. It just did not want this story.
Nobody appears to have run the numbers they claimed to be protecting. Soderbergh expected the conversation to end on cost. It never got there. “I had a really good answer for that,” he told BK Mag. “But it never even got to that point. It’s insane. We’re all very disappointed.”
He called the whole process “two and a half years of free work for me and Adam and Rebecca Blunt.” Driver added the detail that should sting Disney’s bean counters most: “The idea of how he was gonna shoot it was gonna be cheap,” he said on The Rich Eisen Show, while still coming out “very produced.” Small, fast, controlled. The one thing this franchise has refused to be in a decade.
Compare that to what Disney is actually betting on instead. THR reported in September that Jon Watts is attached to direct the first film of Simon Kinberg’s trilogy, the one trades call Episode X, still in development, still not greenlit. The actual dated Star Wars movie on the calendar is Shawn Levy’s Starfighter with Ryan Gosling, arriving for the franchise’s 50th anniversary in May 2027.
Meanwhile the last Star Wars release, The Mandalorian and Grogu, made $345 million worldwide on a $165 million budget, the lowest-grossing live-action entry the series has ever produced. The three films Driver actually made as Ben Solo pulled in $2.06 billion, $1.32 billion and $1.07 billion. A finished script with a built-in audience went in a drawer while an unwritten trilogy stays on the board, and Disney’s own CEO has already conceded the recent numbers were soft. “Even when our franchise films don’t meet our box office expectations, as with the ‘Mandalorian and Grogu’ and the live-action ‘Moana,’ our investments in these core properties fuel other parts of our company,” Josh D’Amaro told investors in August.
The demand was free, and Disney left it sitting there. Fans flew a plane over the Burbank lot reading “Save The Hunt for Ben Solo,” then bought Times Square billboards, sent a skydiver out with a flag, and parked a truck outside the El Capitan on the night The Mandalorian and Grogu opened. “In no way did I think there would be billboards in Times Square,” Driver said. “It’s so moving.” Daisy Ridley, who spent three films opposite him, called the whole thing “a collective of positivity.”
A studio that spends nine figures a year guessing what audiences want had the guess handed to it in flyover banners and turned it down anyway.
Give Disney its fair shot. A spinoff built around a redeemed villain who already died is a tough sell to anyone outside the fandom, and Dave Filoni shut the door flatly at D23: “It’s not here, you won’t find it here.” Studios are allowed to say no.
The problem is not the no. It is that the process never got as far as asking the right question. Soderbergh wrote on Bluesky that he asked Kathleen Kennedy whether Lucasfilm had ever turned in a finished script for greenlight and had it rejected. “She said no, this was a first.” Not a budget call. Not a franchise call. A first.
Weigh that against Oct. 15, when Soderbergh quietly stepped away from his own projects to help Matt Reeves finish the last weeks of principal photography on The Batman Part II, with the full backing of DC Studios.
A filmmaker who drops everything for a rival studio’s franchise, with no visible upside beyond finishing someone else’s vision, is the rarest thing in this business. Disney had that director, a finished script, and a number it never bothered to ask for. It spent two and a half years guarding against a dead character walking back on screen and never once priced the living one standing in the room.
