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Disney gets a lot of stick when it comes to Star Wars. Ever since the Mouse House bought Lucasfilm for $4bn in 2012, there have been those who blame the studio for turning George Lucas’s mythic space opera into an endlessly respawning content farm.
But let’s give them credit where credit’s due: according to a new Associated Press interview with Adam Driver, Disney did at least have the presence of mind to politely decline a film whose entire premise would have been enough to make Darth Vader himself force-choke the pitch meeting from beyond the grave. Yes, it is (or would have been) Ben Solo: The Movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Driver as the resurrected Sith-Jedi protagonist of that oh-so-wonderful entry, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Yes, Driver really does seem to think this film, provisionally titled The Hunt for Ben Solo, is one people might actually want to see. After traumatising the collective psyche of legions of Star Wars fans by reintroducing the long-dead Palpatine, entirely wiping the events of the previous film, and introducing something called the “Force dyad” to explain why Rey and Ren are suddenly snogging, Disney was invited to bring back Kylo for a high-jinks sequel.
“We presented the script to Lucasfilm,” said Driver. “They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle. We took it to [Disney supremos] Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
Driver goes on to say during the interview that he was baffled as to why anyone wouldn’t want to see a Soderbergh Star Wars movie. “We wanted to be economical with it, and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven,” he says. “Empire Strikes Back being, in my opinion, the standard of what those movies were. But he is, to me, one of my favourite directors of all time. He lives his code, lives his ethics, doesn’t compromise.”
The problem is that the question is not whether filmgoers want to see a Star Wars movie made by Soderbergh, a director who could make a tax audit look stylish. It is why would anyone ever want to see the return of Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, Darth Moody or whatever his latest alter ego is? It’s bad enough that we are apparently getting a film in which Daisy Ridley’s Rey will try to restore the Jedi Order, though given this movie was announced in 2023 and still hasn’t even entered production – unconfirmed rumours suggest it’s on hold pending script approval – there is hope.
Kylo Ren is not Spider-Man, Rey is not Wonder Woman: these are not beloved icons of 20th and 21st-century pop mythology who can be wheeled out and reimagined endlessly for decades to come. They are half-finished characters from a franchise that forgot what its own story was about.
And then there’s the fact that Ben Solo really did die at the end of The Rise of Skywalker. Is there some unspoken Hollywood rule that if enough people thought a movie was rubbish, we can all forget everything that happened in it? Can there ever be a viable explanation for Ren’s resurrection that gives any self-respecting Star Wars fan those two hours of our lives back?
We’ll never know what Driver’s movie might have looked like, and that’s a good thing. After all, nobody demanded a sequel to Waterworld in which Kevin Costner opens a desalination startup. So why this?
To many Star Wars fans, The Rise of Skywalker is upsetting because we can never forget about it. It’s there on Disney+ as a canonical big-screen Star Wars movie, for ever. We can try our best to ignore it, to imagine that the original Star Wars trilogy (and perhaps Rogue One) exist in glorious isolation. But there will always be the memory of this most soulless and confected of episodes lumbering through the canon. So no, Adam Driver, we don’t want a Star Wars movie about Ben Solo.
