This Isn’t the Show You’re Looking For: Why Disney Was Right to Dump Adam Driver’s Ben Solo Movie | film

Disney gets a lot of stick when it comes to Star Wars. Ever since the Mouse House bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012, there have been those who blame the studio for turning George Lucas’s legendary space opera into an endless content farm.

But let’s give them credit where it’s due: According to a new Associated Press interview with Adam Driver, Disney at least had the presence of mind to politely decline a movie whose entire premise would have been enough to have Darth Vader himself force-choke the meeting from beyond the grave. Yes, it is (or could have been) Ben Solo: The Movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Driver as the resurrected Sith-Jedi protagonist from that fantastic entry, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Yes, Driver seems to really think that this movie, tentatively titled The Hunt for Ben Solo, is one that people might actually want to see. After causing mass psychological trauma to legions of Star Wars fans by reintroducing the long-dead Palpatine, completely erasing the events of the previous film, and introducing something called a “Force dyad” to explain why Rey and Ren were suddenly hugging each other, Disney was called upon to bring back Kylo in a high-quality sequel.

“We submitted the script to Lucasfilm,” Driver said. “They loved the idea. They completely understood our point of view. We took it on board.” [Disney supremos] Bob Iger and Alan Bergman said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was the case.”

Driver goes on to say during the interview that he was confused as to why anyone wouldn’t want to watch Soderbergh’s Star Wars movie. “We wanted to be economical with it, and do it at a lower cost than most films, but in the same spirit as those films, which are hand-made and character-driven,” he says. “Empire Strikes Back, in my opinion, is the standard of what those movies were. But, for me, he’s one of my favorite directors of all time. He lives his code, he lives his morals, and he doesn’t compromise.”

The problem is that the question isn’t whether moviegoers want to see a Star Wars movie directed by Soderbergh, a director who can make a tax audit look elegant. Which is why anyone would want to see the return of Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, Darth Moody, or whatever his latest alter ego is? It’s bad enough that we’re apparently getting a movie in which Daisy Ridley’s Rey will try to restore the Jedi Order, although since this movie was announced in 2023 and hasn’t entered production yet — unconfirmed rumors suggest it’s on hold awaiting script approval — there’s hope.

Kylo Ren is not Spider-Man, Rey is not Wonder Woman: these are not beloved icons of 20th and 21st century pop mythology that can be endlessly taken out and reimagined for decades to come. They are unfinished characters from a series that has forgotten what its story is about.

Then there’s the fact that Ben Solo actually died at the end of The Rise of Skywalker. Is there an unspoken rule in Hollywood that if enough people think a movie was crap, we can all forget everything that happened in it? Could there be a viable explanation for Ren’s resurrection that would give any self-respecting Star Wars fan those two hours of our lives?

We’ll never know what a Driver movie will be like, and that’s a good thing. After all, no one was clamoring for a sequel to Waterworld in which Kevin Costner opens a desalination startup. So why is this?

For many Star Wars fans, The Rise of Skywalker is annoying because we can never forget it. It’s on Disney+ as a big-screen Star Wars movie, forever. We can do our best to ignore that, to imagine that the original Star Wars trilogy (and perhaps Rogue One) exists in glorious isolation. But there will always be the memory of these more absurd episodes fabricated by canon. So no, Adam Driver, we don’t want a Star Wars movie about Ben Solo.