Guillermo del Toro Reflects On Developing His Never-Made ‘Star Wars’ Movie As “Good Practice”: “We Had The Rise & Fall Of Jabba The Hutt”

Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”) could fill a room with all the unmade projects he’s either developed or has been courted for over the years. Some of those projects include a feature film version of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “At The Mountains of Madness” starring Tom Cruise (A seminal sci-fi horror tale that inspired the likes of “The Thing” and the “Alien” franchise), the sequel to “Pacific Rim,” a series at Marvel/ABC focused on “The Hulk,” and the most infamous being “The Hobbit” movies that passed to Peter Jackson, reluctantly.

Last month, we learned of another big studio project that he was developing with his “Blade II” screenwriter, David S. Goyer, that didn’t get made either. That is a feature film set in “Star Wars” focusing on “the rise and fall” of Jabba The Hutt in the criminal underworld. While del Toro had mused in previous interviews about making a “Godfather”-type story within that universe, it wasn’t until Goyer mentioned that they had actually tried to get it made and had worked on the script at Lucasfilm for it.

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Now, del Toro is reflecting on that experience while chatting with Collider at a Q&A that was held this week and isn’t terribly upset about it not really coming together.

“I believe a movie is going to happen when the Blu-Ray comes out, that’s when I know things are going to happen. In the last moment, things go away. I’ve had it happen many many times. We had the rise and fall of Jabba The Hutt. So, I was super happy, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money. It’s one of those thirty screenplays that goes away. Sometimes I’m bitter, sometimes I’m not. I always turn to my team and say ‘Good practice, guys. Good practice. We designed a great world, we designed great stuff, we learned.’ So, you can never be ungrateful with life. Whatever life sends you there is something to learn from it.”

If you consider what happened within “The Book of Boba Fett,” it might have made a “Jabba The Hutt” project a little redundant as you likely would have seen similar elements. It’ll be interesting to hear if “Fett” got the Jabba thing erased or if they used things developed by del Toro/Goyer in that series produced by Robert Rodriguez. However, given how inventive the Lucasfilm creature shop has been since “The Force Awakens” the potential of an alien creature-focused “Star Wars” movie with del Toro behind feels like such a loss for fans of both “Star Wars” and the filmmaker himself.

Next up for del Toro is a retelling of Mary Shelley‘s “Frankenstein” at Netflix with a cast that consists of Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Andrew Garfield, and Christoph Waltz. Filming on that according to the director is aiming to start sometime in February.

Anyway, you can watch del Toro’s thoughts on that experience in video form below.

SOURCE: COLLIDER

‘Star Wars’: David S. Goyer Wrote A Jabba The Hutt Movie Script For Guillermo del Toro & Jedi Origin Film Set 25,000 Years In The Past

The volume of unmade “Star Wars” projects keeps growing as we’ve now learned of TWO other films that had been in development by screenwriter David S. Goyer (“Blade,” “Batman Begins”). The longtime comic book film writer has now dished to the Happy Sad Confused podcast (See video below) that he not only was involved with a “Star Wars” film for Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”) “four years ago” but also another film that would have explored the origins of the Jedi set 25,000 years before the events of the original film from 1977.

The latter movie sounds a lot like what the “Game of Thrones” showrunners D.B Weiss and David Benioff had been reportedly developing at Lucasfilm before their own exit and what currently writer/director James Mangold (“Logan”) is trying to put together with his own take on the early days of The Force/Jedi.

Goyer and del Toro had previously worked together on the first big Marvel Comics sequel, “Blade II.”

There was once a time when del Toro had mused in an interview with Yahoo! back in 2015 about potentially tackling a Jabba The Hutt movie comparing it to a gangster film within the “Star Wars” universe by citing the “Godfather” saga as his inspiration.

“I would do the sort of ‘Godfather’ saga that Jabba the Hutt had to go through to gain control,” he said. “One, because it’s the character that looks the most like me, and I like him. I love the idea of a Hutt type of mafia, a very complex coup. I just love the character.”

However, given the poor reception of “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” gestating plans for other spinoff films that had been in the works such as Kenobi and Boba Fett feature films were scrapped. Later on, they were both resurrected as Disney+ miniseries. It’s possible whatever del Toro/Goyer was cooking up ultimately got shelved when the studio decided to focus on their streaming series.

UPDATE: Guillermo has confirmed on Twitter that it was indeed his Jabba project.

I’m not exactly sure what Lucasfilm was thinking by turning down a Jabba film from a recent Oscar-winning filmmaker, but you have to imagine that now with this information out in the wild people are going to be questioning that choice on the stuido’s part.

You can watch/listen to that exchange below.

SOURCE: HAPPY SAD CONFUSED