Lucasfilm announced plans for a new Star Wars trilogy from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss to great fanfare in 2018. However, the duo never got to travel from Westeros to a Galaxy Far, Far Away and parted ways with Lucasfilm the following year.
Very little has been revealed about what they had planned or why, beyond a $200 million deal with Netflix, they gave up on what should have been a dream job.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Benioff finally revealed the premise of their trilogy. "We wanted to do The First Jedi," he tells the trade. "Basically how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber..."
Weiss chimed in to jokingly say, "And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson, the duo’s longtime friend and 3BP producer] called his movie The Last Jedi. He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on."
As for why the project didn't come to fruition, it seems we can add the Game of Thrones showrunners to the list of creatives (Kevin Feige, Patty Jenkins, and Damon Lindelof, for example) who have butted heads with Kathleen Kennedy.
"[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story," Benioff reveals. "We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for."
Bizarrely, this concept is one Kennedy has since decided to revisit with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold for his project set during what's been dubbed the "Dawn of the Jedi" era.
When the news of their split with Lucasfilm broke, the executive issued a statement which read, "David Benioff and Dan Weiss are incredible storytellers. We hope to include them in the journey forward when they are able to step away from their busy schedule to focus on Star Wars."
Benioff and Weiss, meanwhile, added: "There are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects. So we are regretfully stepping away."
"We love Star Wars. When George Lucas built it, he built us too. Getting to talk about Star Wars with him and the current Star Wars team was the thrill of a lifetime, and we will always be indebted to the saga that changed everything."
Are you disappointed that The First Jedi movie they had planned didn't become a reality?