The Hunt For Ben Solo Just Keeps Getting Weirder
Director Steven Soderbergh unleashes more details about the canceled Star Wars film.
Star Wars fans have been mourning the loss of Ben Solo, the Star Wars nepo baddie formerly known as Kylo Ren, since he met his demise in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. That the conflicted villain bit the dust just moments after renouncing his ties to the dark side still feels like a betrayal for some — and it got even worse with the reveal that his tragic fate could have been reversed.
Adam Driver first revealed as much in 2025, telling AP News that he’d been quietly working with director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Rebecca Blunt on a story that’d have brought Ben Solo back to the land of the living. When their pitch met approval from Lucasfilm execs, Scott Z. Burns came on to pen a script; though it was “one of the coolest” Driver had ever been attached to, Disney didn’t let the dream last for long.
“We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no,” Driver said. “They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
Driver’s comments understandably kicked up a storm of support for The Hunt for Ben Solo. Fans have since launched a campaign to save the film and its eponymous lead from production purgatory, some even going so far as to buy out billboards in New York’s Times Square. Soderbergh, meanwhile, has revealed more and more about the film’s potential — and his latest update makes its cancellation all the weirder.
The Hunt for Ben Solo spent “two and a half years” in development — only to get axed by Disney.
“That was two and a half years of free work for me and Adam and Rebecca Blunt,” the director told BK Mag. “I’d kind of made the movie in my head, and just felt bad that nobody else was going to get to see it. I thought the conversation [with Disney] was strictly going to be a practical one — where they go, what is this going to cost? And I had a really good answer for that. But it never even got to that point. It’s insane. We’re all very disappointed.”
In a previous post on Bluesky, Soderbergh revealed that no Lucasfilm project has ever made it to the screenwriting stage, only to be axed by Disney. The dissonance in priorities for the two studios has been well established, notably by Lucasfilm’s former president, Kathleen Kennedy. But nowhere has it been clearer than in their dueling interest in The Hunt for Ben Solo. Disney execs couldn’t even entertain the concept of Solo’s return: sure, Iger and Bergman’s concerns were valid, as the character straight-up evaporates at the end of Rise of Skywalker. But that disinterest, paired with what seems to be a huge miscommunication, just ended up wasting everyone’s time. The Hunt for Ben Solo is, again, the rare outlier that broke containment, but the more fans learn of its demise, the worse the working relationship between Disney and Lucasfilm looks.
