Adam Driver has confirmed that The Hunt for Ben Solo, the Star Wars film he spent two years developing with Steven Soderbergh, will not be happening. “It’s over,” he told The Rich Eisen Show on Wednesday, where he was supposed to be talking about his new film Paper Tiger. “No more ‘Star Wars.’ We tried.” For anyone still holding out hope, he added the full diagnosis: “We tried to do one more, yeah, but they were like, ‘No, he’s dead.'”
Which is, to be fair, technically true. Ben Solo faded away into the Force at the end of The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, leaving behind nothing but a lot of unresolved feelings. But this is a franchise in which Emperor Palpatine came back from the bottom of a reactor shaft on the strength of a single line in an opening crawl, so “he’s dead” is less a creative obstacle than a negotiating position.
According to Driver, the script by Scott Z. Burns and Jules Asner (writing as Rebecca Blunt, the pseudonym that turned up on Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky) was really good, and Lucasfilm liked it enough to take it upstairs. Disney said no. Driver told the Associated Press in October 2025 that the verdict came from Bob Iger and Alan Bergman, and that has not changed. He did concede someone could dust it off “if they wanted to”, while also saying, “I think the ship has sailed.” As far as the actor is concerned, the ship has sailed, been decommissioned and turned into a TIE fighter nostalgia attraction at Galaxy’s Edge.
What seems to have touched him is the fandom. Supporters of the Ben Solo cause paid for billboards and even put planes in the air over Disney, which is the most Rebel Alliance thing to happen near a Disney building in years. Driver called the response “pretty incredible”, saying he never expected “billboards and people flying planes over Disney”. He was, by all accounts, more impressed than the executives were.
Ben Solo now joins a crowded cemetery behind the cantina. Rian Johnson was handed a whole new trilogy in November 2017, and nine years later we are still waiting for a single frame of it. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were given their own trilogy in 2018 and walked away from it in 2019. Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron was announced with some fanfare in December 2020 and then quietly taken off Disney’s release calendar. Taika Waititi’s film, it emerged last month, has gone “very iced”, and now sits in the carbonite cupboard next to Han. Daisy Ridley’s Rey film, announced at Celebration in 2023, has gone so quiet that Ridley has just signed up to star in a horror picture, Get Rid of It, which may or may not be a comment on Lucasfilm’s development process.
Add it up and Lucasfilm has announced more Star Wars trilogies since 2017 than it has released Star Wars films since 2019. That would be a funny statistic if it weren’t so close to being literally true.
Nor is it only the films. On Friday, staff at Bit Reactor, the studio behind the turn-based tactics game Star Wars: Zero Company, announced on LinkedIn that they had been laid off. The game has reportedly sold a million copies, but most of the studio had already been furloughed after it apparently ran out of money before launch. At the time of writing there’s been no company statement, so consider that one reported rather than confirmed. Still, it’s a rough week when making a hit Star Wars game turns out to be no better for job security than making a Star Wars film that never gets made.
To be fair to the Mouse, the galaxy isn’t entirely empty. Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling, is dated for 28 May 2027. That lands just in time for the franchise’s 50th birthday, when the original 1977 film (made, let us not forget, at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood) heads back into cinemas, and Star Wars Celebration descends on Los Angeles. Lucasfilm would like you to look at those, please, and not at the cemetery.
But the half-century is exactly why the Ben Solo affair stings. A franchise this old ought to have room for a mid-budget Soderbergh oddity about a dead space prince trying to find his way home. Instead, the most interesting Star Wars stories of the decade are the ones being told on chat shows, in which an actor explains what he’d have done if anyone had let him. Driver at least has a good line to go out on. Kylo Ren spent three films begging to let the past die. Disney, it turns out, was listening.
Sources: TheWrap, CBR, Bespin Bulletin. See also: Taika Waititi’s Star Wars film goes ‘very iced’.
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