10 Cancelled Star Wars Projects
George Lucas Sequel Trilogy
No matter how you look at it, this will always be the biggest “What if…” that looms over the entire Star Wars franchise. While stories about the original plans for Star Wars have varied over the years, it’s clear that there was at some point a plan for George Lucas to helm a sequel trilogy featuring an older Luke Skywalker and a new generation of heroes. Mark Hamill has stated in the past that Lucas spoke to him about returning to the role years later during production on some of the original trilogy movies. Alas, we’ll never get to see what Lucas had envisioned for Episodes VII-IX. While George Lucas offered an outline of the sequel trilogy to Disney when it was announced that they had bought Lucasfilm and were going forward with the Star Wars franchise, his ideas were discarded in favor of the movies we have now. While there are a lot of things to love about the new Disney era Star Wars movies, it’s still a shame that we’ll never get to see the movies that Lucas had in mind to succeed his original masterpieces.
3D versions of Episode II through VI
During the 3D craze that was kicked off after the release of Avatar in 2009, one of the popular trends was to re-release 3D versions of older movies. Several of Disney’s animated movies were converted to 3D and re-released, as well as Titanic and Terminator 2: Judgement Day since they were both also directed by James Cameron (the director of Avatar). It was decided that Star Wars should get on the 3D re-release bandwagon, with the plan being that Lucasfilm would release one 3D Star Wars movie every year over the course of six years, to give them time to convert the movies into 3D. For whatever reason, it was decided that the movies would be released in chronological order meaning that the first one to be released was Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. While this re-release of The Phantom Menace was what pushed the movie over the $1 Billion gross mark, Lucasfilm was sold to Disney later that year and the 3D conversions of the later movies was postponed indefinitely to focus on the production of VII, before disappearing altogether.
Star Wars Underworld
In 2005, it was announced that a live action Star Wars TV show was soon going to be put into production The show which was going to take place between Episode III and Episode IV was going to focus on the criminal underworld of Coruscant. Lucas said that the TV show would feature original characters, though it was hinted that familiar characters from the movie may show up from time to time in the series. Initially, it looked like everything was moving forward with this new TV show. Writers were hired, designers worked on concept art to flesh out the show. In total a reported fifty episode scripts were completed, with Lucas and the production team eyeing a goal of around a hundred episodes for the show in total. However, the targeted release date for the show kept getting pushed back. In 2010, five years after the initial announcement, the series was put on hold citing budget constraints. Reportedly, the scripts that had been written for the show, and the concept that the show was based around, would have ended up costing several million dollars per episode. Lucas stated that with current filmmaking technology each episode could end up costing the same as a feature film, which made the show as a whole prohibitively expensive. Ultimately, the show was put on hold until technology advanced to the point where it was possible to realize the show’s vision while still having a television budget. Kathleen Kennedy has stated that Disney is interested in making a Star Wars live action TV show in the future, but even if/when it’s released, even if it does center around the underground criminal world of Star Wars, it still won’t be the grandiose vision that Lucas had back in 2005.
Star Wars Detours
Star Wars: Underworld was actually one of two different TV shows in development that was planned to take place between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy. The other show was Star Wars: Detours, an animated comedy from the creators of Robot Chicken. According to the creators, Star Wars: Detours was an animated sitcom that would focus on the more mundane things happening in the galaxy, the things between the wars. Detours was showcased at Star Wars Celebration with a two different sizzle reels being shown to the audiences, one which ended up getting released online to give people an idea of the comedic tone the show was going for. Again, the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney resulted in production of the show halting. Disney wanted to focus on the new Star Wars movies that they were developing, plus a comedic take that was essentially parodying the property they had just spent over $4 billion aquiringng, wasn’t something that Disney seemed particularly interested in. There are reportedly 39 completed episodes of Star Wars: Detours that the creators of Robot Chicken have stated will be released at some point, but for now they’re sitting on a shelf somewhere in a Lucasfilm vault.
Boba Fett Standalone Movie
It isn’t just the era before the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm that saw canceled Star Wars projects. Even since the franchise became part of the Disney family, there have been Star Wars projects that never saw the light of day. When it was first announced that the Star Wars franchise would continue with episodes VII-IX being released every other year, it was also quickly announced that the years in between episode releases would see the release of Star Wars spinoff movies that didn’t necessarily follow the story of the Skywalker family. One of these planned movies, in fact the one that was originally set to be released in 2018, was going to be a movie focusing on the bounty hunter Boba Fett. Josh Trank was hired to direct the spinoff movie, but things soon fell apart. Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot in 2015 was both a critical and commercial failure, with insider reports suggesting that Trank felt that the studio had sabotaged his vision for the franchise. Trank reportedly being difficult to work with, especially in a mega franchise setting, resulted in him leaving the Star Wars project in the summer of 2015, though reports differ on whether or not Trank walked away himself or was removed by Lucasfilm. Either way the idea of a Boba Fett movie was put back on the shelf with the Han Solo spinoff prequel being moved to the 2018 slot. While it’s likely that we will have a Boba Fett standalone movie at some point, there’s been no word on when that might be or how close it will come to this initial version of the movie.
Star Wars 1313
Like the Star Wars: Underworld series Star Wars 1313 was a video game that was going to explore the dark, criminal world of Star Wars. At one point the game was even considered as a direct tie-in to the tv show. Star Wars 1313 was surrounded by hype as demos and previews for the game were shown at both Star Wars and video game conventions. LucasArts even took steps to create a character model for these presentations to hide the fact that in the finished game, the player would get to play as Boba Fett. But once again, the purchase by Disney resulted in Star Wars 1313 getting pushed aside with all of LucasArts getting shut down. In 2014 it was revealed that Disney had abandoned the trademark for 1313 completely.
Star Wars Battlefront III
This is at least one video game cancellation that can’t be directly blamed on the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm. After two successful console games, it was expected that Star Wars: Battlefront III would soon be along. It turns out that the game was put into production, but then was canceled before completion for seemingly unknown reasons. Even now, we still don’t know exactly what happened to cause the game to get canceled. Reports from ex-employees of Free Radical, the studio working on the game, was that Battlefront III was pretty much done, 99% completed by some estimates, but it was effectively canceled when LucasArts could not commit to “spending big” on the marketing of the game. However, anonymous sources from LucasArts suggested a different version of events. According to the sources from LucasArts, Free Radical had seriously misrepresented or underestimated their ability to deliver the game in a timely fashion. Supposedly Free Radical failed to meet several deadlines on the game and that at times the functionality of the game was simply not present. The 99% completion stat was also addressed with a source from LucasArts saying the number was untrue and that at best Free Radical had 75% of a very mediocre game. Of course these statements lead to a former co founder of Free Radical to respond, saying that many of the allegations raised were simply untrue with other being poorly represented versions of the truth. He stated that the game was considered “content complete” and at this late stage of development they were focused on fixing bugs in the game. While we’ll probably never know exactly happened to cause this game to ultimately get canceled, ending the Battlefront franchise until it’s EA reboot, it seems that the inability of these two companies to work together is what caused the game to never see the light of day.
The Heart of the Jedi
In the early 1990s the Star Wars extended universe was being developed in a big way. The success of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy meant that more and more EU novels were being commissioned, one of which was a novel titled The Heart of the Jedi by Kenneth C. Flint.This book was meant to be the first in a trilogy of books that would take place immediately after the destruction of the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. By the end of 1992, Flint has sent in a first draft of the book but never heard back. Eventually Flint’s agent contacted Bantam Spectra the publisher of the Star Wars EU novels as learned that The Heart of the Jedi could not be published as it no longer fit into the Star Wars canon of the other books. Supposedly the position in the timeline had been promised to another author when meant that The Heart of the Jedi was never published. Years later, in 2015, Flint was allowed to release a version of his novel that had been edited to fit in with the Star Wars timeline. While it’s not an official Star Wars book, this is at least one canceled Star Wars project that you can get your hands on here.
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
We all know that Star Wars was one of the biggest movies of all time in 1977 smashing box office records and changing the face of cinema as we know it. But what if that hadn’t happened. What if Star Wars had only been a modest hit, or had struggled to bring in enough money to cover the initial investment. Apparently George Lucas had a plan for that outcome as well with what may have been the very first canceled Star Wars project. Had Star Wars not been the smash success that it ended up being, Lucas had an idea for a sequel that was much more modest than what we eventually got with The Empire Strikes Back. The low budget sequel was going to be Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, and a novelization of the idea was released in 1978 the year after the original Star Wars was released. Looking at the novel we can get a good idea of what the movie might have been like. Unlike the original Star Wars movie Splinter of the Mind’s Eye takes place on a single planet with only a minimal amount of space shots in the opening scene. Han Solo is absent from the plot as Harrison Ford wasn’t contracted beyond the first movie at the time. According to the novel’s author, Alan Dean Foster, he was told that he couldn't really introduce anything that would require the movie version to need new props, so that existing props from the movie could be reused cheaply. Also, a space fight scene in an earlier draft of the book had to be removed as it would likely be too expensive to film. Of course, as it turns out Star Wars went on to out earn every other movie in the history of filmmaking at the time, and the need for a low budget sequel was no longer required. Star Wars would go on to have a big budget sequel with The Empire Strikes Back and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye would remain as a book in the Expanded Universe.
More Video Games than you could possibly imagine
In 2008 a book was published that detailed the history of LucasArts, the company that created the Star Wars video games. While it’s an interesting look at the company’s history starting at the way back at 1982, one of the interesting tidbits in the book is a bit about games that never made it far into the development stage. Over a two page spread there are twenty logos for Star Wars games that were canceled. While this technically puts our count at over ten canceled Star Wars projects, we don’t know a whole lot about any one of these games beyond their title, so we lumped them all into this one entry. Still, a look at the titles reveals a few interesting games that were in development at LucasArts. There’s a logo for a game titled Jedi Knight III, which probably would have been the next game in the Dark Forces series. Two games look like they would have let the player take control of Darth Vader or Darth Maul in Sith based games. A Han Solo video game also appeared to be in the works as well. One title was for a game titled Star Wars: Underworld, which may have been a game tie-in to the TV show mentioned above, or possibly an early logo for the game that would eventually go on to be Star Wars: 1313. Still the most interesting logo was for Star Wars: Episode VII - Shadows of the Sith. Is it possible that this was a tie-in game to a previously unannounced version of Episode VII that was in development some time in the 2000s? Or was there a plan at some point to continue the story of the Star Wars saga through the video games? It’s unknown exactly what Shadows of the Sith could have entailed but it’s crazy to think of how Star Wars could have been today if any of these projects had gone forward.
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