David Benioff and DB Weiss’s film was originally planned to be titled The First Jedi.

By Morgan Jeffery

Published: Friday, 29 March 2024 at 10:43 AM

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David Benioff and DB Weiss, best known as showrunners on Game of Thrones and new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, have spoken out about their scrapped Star Wars trilogy.

Weiss told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he and Benioff “got relatively far, storywise” with the first of their planned movies before Lucasfilm opted to drop the project.

“We [also] had a basic roadmap to the other two,” said Weiss. “It was a shame.

“The truth is our Hollywood ratio, or batting average of things conceived to things actually finished has never been tremendously high, and there’s always going to be ones that get away for various reasons. You know, the ones that were never meant to be – and it was sad that was one of them for us.

“But as time goes on, you just kind of need to let go of those kinds of things, because if you don’t you’ll drive yourself completely crazy.”

Benioff and Weiss’s film was originally planned to be titled The First Jedi, with Benioff having previously told The Hollywood Reporter that the resulting trilogy would explore “how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the [origins of the] first lightsaber”.

“[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.”

Though their project did not go ahead, another film set early in the Star Wars timeline called Dawn of the Jedi is in development with Logan director James Mangold.

Mangold has described his film in an interview with Gizmodo as an “origin story of how the Force came to be known, understood, wielded, and harnessed.”