The showrunners of HBO‘s Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, explain just how close they were to getting their Star Wars trilogy off the ground.
“I think we got relatively far, storywise, with the first one,” Weiss said during an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz (per ComicBook). “We had a basic roadmap to the other two, and it was a shame. The truth is our Hollywood ratio, or batting average, of things conceived to things actually finished, has never been tremendously high, and there’s always going to be ones that get away for various reasons. The ones that were never meant to be. And it was sad that was one of them for us. But as time goes on, you just kind of need to let go of those kinds of things because if you don’t, you’ll drive yourself completely crazy.”
In January, Benioff and Weiss revealed details about their scrapped Star Wars project, which was titled The First Jedi. The premise was set years before the prequel trilogy featuring the origins of the Jedi Order and the creation of the first lightsaber. Ultimately, Lucasfilm‘s decision to reject the story led to Benioff and Weiss exiting the franchise in favor of a multi-year deal to produce original projects for Netflix.
“[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that,” Benioff said. “And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.”
James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi movie
With Lucasfilm shifting its focus to bring Star Wars back to the big screen, the studio has hired James Mangold to direct an untitled project set during the Dawn of the Jedi era. Similar to Benioff and Weiss’ project, Mangold’s movie will explore the origins of the Force which was a concept that attracted Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy.
“For me, it’s about, I want to be part of the saga, but I also don’t want to be holding so much lore in the air that you can hardly tell a story,” Mangold said. ” And what I really wanted to do, what I told her, was just can we make a kind of the Ten Commandments of the Force, you know? A kind of origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.”
