Steven Soderbergh Can’t Save Star Wars. Can Anybody?

It’s always a cruel twist of the knife when fans hear about what could have been—ideas that sounds incredible on paper but just never came to fruition for whatever reason. But the case of Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars pitch feels particularly cruel. In a recent interview, Adam Driver revealed that he’d come to Steven Soderbergh some years ago with an idea for a Star Wars film that would close the book on the character Driver played in three Star Wars sequels between 2015 and 2019—Ben Solo aka Kylo Ren, the wayward, Dark Side-of-the-Force-swayed son of Han Solo and Princess Leia. What began as a conversation between creative friends apparently got very real. A finished script (co-written with Rebecca Blount and Scott Z. Burns) made it all the way up the creative and corporate chain to Disney CEO Bob Iger, before being rejected—supposedly because in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, Ben Solo died.