We could have had Driver and Soderbergh instead of The Mandalorian and Grogu, and people are not happy.
Star Wars fans are used to tempering their expectations. History is littered with the desiccated corpses of Star Wars projects that never saw the light of day, from Rian Johnson’s planned trilogy to whatever the Game Of Thrones team of D. B. Weiss and David Benioff were cooking up (apparently Taika Waititi’s film is still in the works, though, as is Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron movie – colour me shocked). But recent news that Oceans 11 director Steven Soderbergh was all ready to go with a project focusing on Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren has gotten fans into a bigger tizzy than anything since… well, The Last Jedi, frankly.
Driver spilled the beans in a recent interview with the Associated Press, noting that the working title was The Hunt for Ben Solo and “…it was really cool.” Driver, of course, played Kylo Ren, AKA Ben Solo, in the sequel trilogy, in which the black clad villain redeemed himself in the third and final film before dying, as is often the case with redemption arcs. But death isn’t much of a barrier to reappearing in the Star Wars universe – hell, Driver killed his on screen father, Harrison Ford, in The Force Awakens, only for the grumpy legend to show up to dispense afterlife advice in The Rise Of Skywalker. And someone else came back in the flick too, IIRC.
Driver enlisted director Steven Soderbergh for the project, which is no small thing, but it was not to be.
“We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it,” Driver said. “We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
As for Soderbergh, the prolific filmmaker paused briefly to comment that “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.”
And normally that would be that. But it seems some folks really want a Kylo Ren renaissance.
Naturally, we’ve had the usual online furore which, stripped of its hyperbole, boils down to “That sounds cool”, which it does, and “Good Lord, The Rise Of Skywalker sucked absolute ass”, which it did. And that may be some of the fuel on this particular fandom fire, with audiences wanting a better end for old Kylo/Ben than what he got.
To, that end, Star Wars uber-fan Lianna Al Allaf went so far as to hire a plane to fly a banner reading SAVE THE HUNT FOR BEN SOLO over Disney Headquarters in Los Angeles.
Not to be outdone and invoking an admirable level of East Coast/West Coast rivalry, New York City fan B.D. Neagle rented a Times Square billboard to display the message “For Adam. No one’s ever really gone. Hope lives. Ben is alive! #THBS”.
Collider grabbed a little time with Neagle, who said, “What makes this fight for Ben Solo different is that we know a finished script exists. There was a director attached, and Adam Driver himself had been looking for a way to tell Ben’s story. It’s no longer simply wanting a character to return. It’s about fighting for a story that was ready to be told.”
Putting aside a few things (plenty of great projects get killed way later in the process, Disney has no idea what to do with Star Wars, these people have way too much money on their hands) it’s not like there’s not prior form when it comes to fan movements resurrecting seemingly dead projects. For better or worse, rabid DCEU fans did get Zack Snyder’s four hour Justice League released, although they couldn’t do much for David Ayers’ Suicide Squad. And they did get us more Morbin’ time with Jared Leto not too long ago, although I’m given to understand that may have been somewhat ironic.
Whether this is a fandom groundswell is debatable, but hey, it certainly got my attention, and I wouldn’t say no to a Soderbergh Star Wars – that’s a guy who loves experimenting with different genres, and I bet he’d do something cool in the Star Wars space. His last sci-fi effort was 2002’s Solaris, which was… not very Star Wars-like, let’s leave it at that. Could be the Reylo shippers are onto something here, though.
