Guillermo del Toro Confirms He Worked on a Jabba the Hutt ‘Star Wars’ Movie Written by David S. Goyer, Who Was Also Developing a Dawn of the Jedi Script
Rumblings about Guillermo del Toro working on Star Wars have been going around for literally a decade, most of them based on truths. The filmmaker got a phone call about Episode VII right after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, and though he turned it down, he said he was in conversations with the top executives at Lucasfilm, publicly discussing his idea for a Jabba the Hutt movie Godfather style. Well, it seems like the idea was more than just a couple of conversations over drinks.
David S. Goyer, the famed screenwriter behind The Dark Knight and Man of Steel, who already worked for Lucasfilm on the VR game Vader Immortal, did an interview recently with Josh Horowitz to promote the second season of Apple’s Foundation, and confirmed his collaboration with Lucasfilm extended beyond virtual reality. Apparently, Goyer wrote a full script for a Star Wars movie that del Toro was going to direct, and a scriptment (a middle step between a treatment and a full script) for an “origins of the Jedi” movie that sounds a lot like James Mangold’s announced film:
“I wrote an unproduced Star Wars movie that Guillermo del Toro was going to direct. That was about four years ago. And then I also have a scriptment for an origins of the Jedi movie, also for Star Wars, that took place 25,000 years before the first Star Wars film.”
Guillermo del Toro caught the Twitter post with the snippet of the interview and replied saying: “True. Can’t say much. Maybe two letters ‘J’ and ‘BB’ is that three letters?” When pressed about what went down that terminated the project before it was further developed, Goyer said the following:
“There was just a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time, but it’s a cool script. You should ask Guillermo about it the next time you have him on, it’s a cool script. There’s a lot of cool artwork from it that was produced.”
True. Can't say much. Maybe two letters "J" and "BB" is that three letters? https://t.co/qpGaSD3y7F
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) September 21, 2023
Goyer says that happened about four years ago, which seems to line up with the 2018-2019 window where Lucasfilm was going through a lot of turmoil on the film side (they still kind of are, of course, but that was the peak), when everyone freaked out about Solo: A Star Wars Story underperforming at the box office six months after the disappointing fan reaction to The Last Jedi. That resulted in getting The Rise of Skywalker across the finish line however way they could and in the studio deciding they would be shifting gears for the next little while and focusing on streaming. Announced projects from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson, and the unannounced Obi-Wan Kenobi live-action film were either shelved indefinitely or outright scrapped during that time (the last one was of course retooled as a Disney Plus series), and those are the ones we know about. Taika Waititi also boarded the party on the tail end of the window, and the jury is still out on that one (though as of May 1, he was actively working on the script).
It’s unclear when Lucasfilm parted ways with del Toro, but reading between the lines, it seems that during the second half of 2021 there was another shift on the film department, when they started taking in more pitches and parted ways with Patty Jenkins, who had been developing Rogue Squadron for almost two years. Damon Lindelof, Jams Mangold, and Shawn Levy were among the filmmakers who came in with that new wave. Donald and Stephen Glover too, though the former was already in talks to do Lando for Disney Plus.
What’s perhaps most interesting about the quote is that the Dawn of the Jedi movie that James Mangold has been announced to write and direct is actually an idea that has been circulating inside the Lucasfilm offices for much longer than we thought. From what we could gather after Star Wars Celebration, where the announcement was made, it seemed like this was a pitch that Mangold made to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy during production of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Kennedy was apparently instantly excited about teaming up with the Logan director again, and gave him a quick thumbs up. It’s unknown if any of the ideas from Goyer’s scriptment will carry over to Mangold’s story.
Lucasfilm declined to comment.
Disney has set three future dates for Star Wars theatrical releases, on May 22, 2026; December 18, 2026, and December 17, 2027.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
