Lucasfilm first revealed plans for a new Star Wars trilogy from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss in 2018. The news generated a great deal of excitement among fans, but the duo never got to travel from Westeros to a Galaxy Far, Far Away and parted ways with Lucasfilm the following year.
Only bits and pieces have ever been shared about what they had planned or why, beyond a $200 million deal with Netflix which has so far only given us 3 Body Problem, they gave up on what should have been a dream job.
Talking to Games Radar, the duo was asked whether they're still keen to work with Lucasfilm on their Star Wars trilogy, presumably when their current working relationship with Netflix ends. For now, though, it doesn't sound like they're keen to work on any pre-existing franchises.
"No, I don't think so," Benioff says. "I think you know, when you've got a franchise that's already so well established, like Star Wars or James Bond or so forth, I think there's less independence when you come in to try to tell a story that you want to tell and so I think what Dan [Weiss] and I have learned is that it's more fun for us to start something afresh."
"Obviously, we're coming in on the shoulders of [author] Cixin Liu here, he's the one who created these novels and everything but because we're the ones adapting them, at least for the English language," he says of how 3 Body Problem differs. "We have a lot of flexibility in terms of the story we want to tell and that's a lot more fun for us than the other version."
Weiss, meanwhile, was quick to point out that they're already mulling over ideas to continue this specific story, so it's no wonder they haven't given Star Wars much thought. "We don't have a second season, but we need to keep pushing forward full steam ahead as if we did. Because if we do get a second season, we'll need to hit the ground running in terms of pre-production and production to get it out to people in some kind of reasonable time."
Earlier this year, Benioff finally shed some light on the premise of their trilogy when he said, "We wanted to do The First Jedi. Basically how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber..."
"[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story," he continued. "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."
Do you think the former Game of Thrones showrunners made the right call by giving up their Star Wars movies?