What Ever Happened To George Lucas's "Lost" Star Wars Series?
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Among some of the forgotten lore surrounding the Star Wars franchise there existed a planned live-action series before George Lucas sold the rights to the franchise to Disney and well before the first live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, which premiered in 2019. Tentatively entitled Star Wars: Underworld, the planned live-action series would have been set shortly after Revenge of the Sith (2005) and, instead of containing “lighter” all-age material that the franchise is well-known for, the series would have appealed to a more mature audience.
Producer Rick McCallum, a close associate of George Lucas, discussed some of the details and challenges regarding the planned series recently on the Young Indy Chroniclers Podcast:
"I think we had over sixty scripts, third-draft scripts...again, the most wonderful writers in the world on it. We created exactly the same experience for everybody on the Ranch...it was a phenomenal group of talent. These were dark. These were not...they were sexy, they were violent, they were just absolutely wonderful, wonderful...complicated, challenging...it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe. And Disney definitely never would have offered to buy it from George. [laughs] It's one of the great disappointments of our lives. But the problem was, each episode was bigger than the films. The lowest I could get it down to, with the technology that existed then, was about $40 million an episode."
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Believing that Disney would never buy such a mature series at the time, George Lucas planned to pitch his new series to executives at HBO, however, a meeting to do so never took place as its CEO at the time had to pull out of their scheduled meeting due to dealing with a scandal. Due to his inability to gain an audience with HBO, as well as the massive estimated cost of the series as previously described by McCallum, the series never came to fruition.
Lucas also ended up selling his franchise to Disney in 2012, thus ending the likelihood of further development of the series, espescially since Disney immediately wound down Lucas’ ongoing hit animated Star Wars series, The Clone Wars (2008-2020), as well as a similarly gritty and mature Star Wars videogame being developed at the time, entitled Star Wars 1313.
It is unknown whether or not the sixty finished scripts for episodes of Star Wars: Underground were ever handed over to Disney as part of the sale. It is entirely possible that they were and, even though the actual series never materialized, elements of those scripts a la Legends materials have since turned up in other Star Wars projects.
Writers at Lucasfilm are known for rarely wasting unused ideas and/or concepts they like and tend tpo find a suitable new home for them in other projects. Additionally, despite the failure of Star Wars: Underground, it undoubtedly laid the groundwork for live action Star Wars series produced under the Disney umbrella during the past six years, including some series that clearly have darker and more mature subject matter such as Andor (2022) and The Acolyte (2024).
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