Guillermo del Toro Almost Made a Star Wars Movie

Movies

Of the many Star Wars projects that have fallen by the wayside, this one may raise the interest of even the most cynical Star Wars critic (like me). While appearing on the podcast Happy Sad Confused, veteran screenwriter David Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins, Dark City) revealed that he was working on a Star Wars movie with Guillermo del Toro, with whom he’d collaborated on Blade II and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. According to Goyer, this film was being developed four years ago and fell apart because there was “a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time.” He also wrote a script for what he describes as “an origins of the Jedi movie” that would have taken place 25,000 years before A New Hope. You can see the whole episode here, but the clip about Star Wars is below, courtesy of Happy Sad Confused host Josh Horowitz:

David Goyer wrote a STAR WARS movie to be directed by @RealGDT that we’ll never see?! I’m going to need a minute.

My full chat with David here: https://t.co/3qAJn5Zv5c pic.twitter.com/XcSHQA8pL0

— Josh Horowitz (@joshuahorowitz) September 21, 2023

I’d like to see that artwork. I don’t hold any hope for Star Wars being good again – I place the end of the good era farther back than a lot of people do – but at the very least, Guillermo del Toro would have created some fantastic imagery. Think of the menagerie of alien creatures he’d have populated that universe with; if anyone could rival Lucas’ imagination on that score, it’s del Toro. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (a movie I absolutely love) had a stunning tapestry of monsters, which is one of the main reasons why it’s so much better than the first one (which del Toro also directed, admittedly); applying that kind of creativity to Star Wars would be fantastic. I suspect this is a big part of why the film never came together; Lucasfilm doesn’t seem interested in imagination or creativity right now. They want references, callbacks, disguised remakes, and alien species we’ve already seen. Kathleen Kennedy doesn’t seem like the type to tolerate a Guillermo del Toro, much like she got rid of the Lego Movie guys and brought in Ron Howard to replace them. (I like Ron Howard, but Star Wars isn’t exactly his milieu, and I don’t doubt Solo was a paycheck job for him.) The architect of the sequel trilogy (as much as you can call backing out, coming back, and making it up as you go along “architecture”) was blander-than-bland JJ Abrams, who couldn’t design a cool monster if he were allowed to rip it off wholesale. But that artwork must be cool.