A Guillermo del Toro ‘Star Wars’ Movie Almost Happened, Screenwriter David S. Goyer Says

Matt Grobar
·2 min read
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Guillermo del Toro was set around “four years ago” to direct a Star Wars movie that has never come together, screenwriter David S. Goyer has revealed.

Goyer divulged the news during a recent appearance on the podcast Happy Sad Confused hosted by Josh Horowitz, sharing that he “wrote an unproduced Star Wars movie that Guillermo del Toro was going to direct.”

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When asked why the project never took off, the scribe explained: “There was just a lot of behind[-the-scenes] stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time, but it’s a cool script … There’s a lot of cool artwork from it that was produced.”

Del Toro chimed in via Twitter fairly quickly to affirm Goyer’s account of events. “True. Can’t say much. Maybe two letters “J” and “BB” is that three letters?” he teased, presumably alluding to the characters Jabba the Hutt and BB-8.

Goyer also shared during his recent podcast appearance that he wrote a scriptment for an “Origins of the Jedi movie,” set 25,000 years before the events of the franchise as we currently know it. But that project has likewise gone unproduced. How events coalesced was a bit unfortunate, he suggested, because “dabbling [further] in Star Wars would’ve been fun” for him, even if he was able to dip his toe into the world of the series via the VR project Vader Immortal.

Even if del Toro’s Star Wars pic never came to pass, it seems that the kernel of Goyer’s idea for his ‘Origins’ project has lived on in the form of a forthcoming film to be helmed by James Mangold, which was announced at the Star Wars Celebration in London back in April. When chatting with i09 two months later, the filmmaker described the project as “kind of the Ten Commandments of the Force” — “a kind of origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.” Also coming up for Lucasfilm on the film side of Star Wars are new titles from Dave Filoni and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy; Daisy Ridley is set to reprise her role as Rey in the latter.

Most recently expanding the canon of Star Wars films was J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which came in as the lowest-grossing installment of the sequel trilogy Abrams himself kicked off, when it arrived in theaters in 2019.

Both the Happy Sad Confused clip highlighting Goyer’s Star Wars comments and Del Toro’s Twitter response can be found below.

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