Steven Soderbergh Says The Ben Solo Star Wars Movie Is 100% Dead

We won’t be seeing Adam Driver’s Ben Solo again in the Star Wars galaxy: “If it was gonna happen, it would have happened”

Star Wars fans lost their goddamn minds in October last year when director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 11, The Limey, Solaris, and too many other greats to count) revealed that he and actor Adam Driver had been beavering away on a new Star Wars movie that would have seen Driver’s character, Ben Solo, somehow resurrected after his death in The Rise Of Skywalker and off on a new adventure.

Sadly, the project was dead in the water by the time we all heard about it. The Hunt For Ben Solo, as it was titled, was rejected by executives at Lucasfilm parent company Disney, and that was pretty much that. Although Adam Driver, who initiated the project, had secured his Logan Lucky director, Soderbergh; an apparently fantastic script by Scott Z. Burns; and the heartfelt approval of Kathleen Kennedy, then head of Lucasfilm, Disney suits Bob Iger and Alan Bergman said no, with Driver saying the pair simply could not understand how Solo could be alive. Which strikes me as, well, insane, but there you go.

But since then – and this all happened years ago, around 2021 – there has been some personnel shuffling at Lucasfilm, with Kennedy retiring and Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan stepping in. Similarly, Bob Iger’s out at Disney, replaced by Josh D’Amaro in March. That’s making some fans wonder if there’s a chance that The Hunt For Ben Solo might be back with a chance.

But Soderbergh has an answer for that.

“Nope.”

Asked about the possibility in a new interview excerpt published on The Playlist, Soderbergh shot it down immediately.

He did note that he valued the whole experience immensely, though. “I don’t regret one minute of the time we spent working on that,” he said. “I felt the work was good. It’s just good for you to be in that room and working on it. It’s like CrossFit—it’s good for you. It’ll have a residual effect that will be unexpected at some point.”

But when the big “no” came down, he immediately pivoted to other projects.

“As soon as it became apparent, OK, not gonna happen, I sat down and started writing [something else],” Soderbergh added. “It’s like, ‘OK, new scenario, let’s get cracking.’ At a certain point, it’s like complaining about the weather. You just gotta keep moving.

“Look, if it was gonna happen, it would have happened. It’s that simple.”

Damn shame.