It's no secret that Obi-Wan Kenobi was once going to be a movie, though how similar it would have been to the Disney+ series is hard to say. There's a lot of conflicting information out there about whether Darth Maul was going to be involved and when exactly Lucasfilm decided they would shift focus to Darth Vader. What we didn't know is that movie was the first part of a trilogy!
During an interview with The Direct, original Obi-Wan Kenobi writer Stuart Beattie confirmed he had no involvement with the TV show and that he was only credited because certain ideas and characters he came up with were incorporated into that by Head Writer Joby Harold.
"I wrote the film that they based the show on," he explained. "Joby came on and took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six. So, I did not work with them at all, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff."
"When I pitched my Obi-Wan story to Lucasfilm, I said, 'There are actually three stories here. Because there are three different evolutions that the character has to make in order to go from Obi-Wan to Ben,'" Beattie continued. "And the first one was the first movie, which was the show. The second [movie] was thinking about where Kenobi ends up."
Beattie would go on to say that he wanted to shift the focus to exploring why Obi-Wan ultimately decided to sacrifice himself on the Death Star. "It's one of those universal things we all struggle with, to come to terms with our own mortality. So, that was the second step of the evolution for me, that Obi-Wan now has to come to terms with his own mortality, somehow in a prophecy, or Qui-Gon telling him, 'There's going to come a moment where you're gonna have to sacrifice yourself for the good.'"
"And then [Obi-Wan] is like, 'What? No, no, no, no, I'm here to help... I can't, no.' And get him to that point where Obi-Wan has accepted the idea that he's going to die, and that he's going to die willingly at a crucial moment, and you will know when that moment presents itself. So that when that moment comes up in [A New Hope], you understand."
It's an interesting idea, but is it a necessary one? An Obi-Wan Kenobi trilogy would have been fun, but it also sounds like it might have stretched the story out a little too much, arguably making too much of Ben's decision to allow Darth Vader to strike him down so he could become more powerful.
Unfortunately, Beattie didn't make any mention of which villains his scripts would have focused on, but looking back at old rumours, we'd guess Sharad Hett and Maul factored into proceedings.
Would you have preferred an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie trilogy over a TV series?