If you aren’t a Star Wars nerd, you can skip this post, I promise.
I think episode 5 of The Book of Boba Fett has been out long enough now that I can share a pet theory of mine here publicly. You might remember that four years ago, David Benioff and D.B. (Dan) Weiss were hired to create a trilogy of Star Wars features. At the time, we were told those movies would appear in two-year increments starting in 2023. For those who don’t know, Benioff and Weiss were the showrunners of Game of Thrones, and they met with George Lucas in Italy as research for their trilogy-in-progress. Then, in October 2019, all that fell apart, and many speculated they’d blown the deal by either admitting they learned showrunning on the job (which I suspect was needlessly expensive) or by signing a concurrent, multimillion dollar deal to craft content for Netflix. Lucasfilm exec Kathleen Kennedy may not have liked sharing — Who knows? We never learned the subject of their proposed trilogy, but that’s where my theory comes in.
Lucasfilm has a habit of building expectations, dashing them, then repurposing that archived material to create new stories. For example, “kyber crystals” were in early drafts of Star Wars, then reappeared in the now-disowned novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Decades later, they’re canon, with mentions in Clone Wars and Rogue One. Concepts from cancelled computer game Star Wars: 1313 have resurfaced as canon in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. The Obi-Wan Kenobi series debuting on Disney+ this year evolved from a planned feature directed by James Mangold. And so on.
Well, obviously Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are heavily invested in telling a grand, historical fantasy about planet Mandalore and its complex, Spartan culture. Here’s my theory: I think Benioff and Weiss were hired to craft a similar epic tale about Mandalore. It seems clear to me Mandalore will be the focus of a Game of Thrones-style mythos over the next few years on Disney+. There are dueling houses, vigorous swordplay and even draconian beasts in the mix (though I still think the term “mythosaur” is a bit on-the-nose, even for Star Wars). If I’m right, Favreau and Filoni will have a lot of material to pull from, and we might even see some concepts from 1313 and Star Wars: Underworld, the series Lucasfilm worked on from 2005 to 2010 but never shot. We’re told Underworld banked some 50 scripts, by writers including Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica and For All Mankind fame, but we’ve never seen any of them. I suspect they could easily be transposed to “the living waters beneath the mines of Mandalore.” After all, we’d rather that location not look as much like Moria as it sounds, right?
Incidentally, now that Patty Jenkins is almost certainly off the Rogue Squadron movie, which was announced with great fanfare in 2020 but “postponed indefinitely” less than a year later, how great would it be if Ronald Moore took the reins of that exciting project?
And while we’re at it, here’s my own Star Wars pitch: I want to write a Disney+ series set in the Outer Rim, maybe 10-15 years before A New Hope. I see it as kind of an anthology series, with characters drifting in and out of each other’s stories, based on an awesome Mike Resnick novel from 1986 called Santiago: a Myth of the Far Future. If you’ve never read Santiago, look it up. It has the feel of a tall tale crossed with a spaghetti Western, which puts it exactly in early Star Wars territory despite being entirely unconnected to Star Wars.
So what did you think Benioff and Weiss’s trilogy would be about? And now that Jenkins is almost certainly off the Rogue Squadron project, who do you think should take it over?
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