Not so long ago in a galaxy not so far, far away, Guillermo del Toro developed a scrapped Star Wars spin-off about Jabba the Hutt. After screenwriter David S. Goyer revealed he wrote an unproduced Star Wars movie for Del Toro, the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water filmmaker confirmed he developed his Star Wars story “MANY, MANY moons ago” and tweeted a hint: “J and BB.” In a new interview with Collider for the 10th anniversary of 2013’s Pacific Rim, Del Toro confirmed the project was about the “rise and fall” of Tatooine’s resident crime lord.
“We had the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt, so I was super happy. We were doing a lot of stuff, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money, and then it’s one of those 30 screenplays that goes away,” Del Toro said. “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.’ You can never be ungrateful with life. Whatever life sends you, there’s something to be learned from it. So, you know, I trust the universe, I do. When something doesn’t happen, I go, ‘Why?’ I try to have a dialogue with myself. ‘Why didn’t it happen?’ And the more you swim upstream with the universe, the less you’re gonna realize where you’re going.”
The Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy filmmaker — who next resurrects Frankenstein’s monster in his adaptation of Frankenstein — didn’t explain why Disney’s Lucasfilm didn’t move forward with the Jabba the Hutt movie. After spin-offs Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story, Lucasfilm scrapped plans for Obi-Wan Kenobi and Boba Fett feature films that eventually made it to Disney+ as live-action series.
“It was just a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time. It’s a cool script,” Goyer said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast about Del Toro’s Star Wars movie, adding: “It’s a cool story. There’s a lot of cool artwork of it that was produced.”
Star Wars has been on a theatrical hiatus since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker concluded the nine-episode Skywalker Saga in 2019. At Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy announced three new Star Wars movies from directors James Mangold (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), Dave Filoni (Star Wars: Ahsoka), and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel).
