David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have departed from Lucasfilm and they are not the first filmmakers that has stepped down from the Star Wars franchise, leaving no clear picture of what the future holds.
Also read: Lucasfilm To Slowdown ‘Star Wars’ Productions
In the days and weeks since their announcement, news has continually trickled out about how the deal between Lucasfilm and Benioff and Weiss fractured.
Their official statement to Deadline reads,
We love Star Wars. When George Lucas built it, he built us too. Getting to talk about Star Wars with him and the current Star Wars team was the thrill of a lifetime and we will always be indebted to the saga that changed everything.
Beinoff and Weiss
Benioff and Weiss ended up signing a deal with Netflix for $250 million over last summer. At this time, Benioff and Weiss were still set to create, write, and produce a brand new Star Wars trilogy for Lucasfilm. The first film was originally slated to be released in December of 2022.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, sources inside Disney and Lucasfilm claim that Benioff and Weiss ended up having second thoughts about jumping from one big franchise to another, especially after the very divisive last season of Game of Thrones.
They started getting cold feet at the prospect of facing the toxic fandom of Star Wars. It’s said that they signed their deal before Solo came out to critical divisiveness. After watching both Ron Howard and Rian Johnson get beat up across the internet over how their Star Wars films were received, it’s believed Benioff and Weiss got second thoughts.
Sources also say that Kathleen Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm, was not happy that Benioff and Weiss had made a secondary deal with Netflix as she didn’t believe that they could handle both jobs. As the months since the original deal with Lucasfilm were signed, Benioff and Weiss ended up going from writing three feature films, to writing only one film.
They ended up making a second joint statement saying, “There are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice for both Star Wars and our Netflix projects. So we are regretfully stepping away.”
It seems that Benioff and Weiss left either because they were scared of being criticized or because they can’t do more than one project at a time.
Benioff and Weiss were supposed to create a second show for HBO called Confederate, that never ended up seeing the light of day and they cancelled their final Game of Thrones appearance at San Diego Comic-Con.
The current future of Star Wars is very uncertain as Kevin Fiege was originally set to make his own Star Wars film, while Rian Johnson was still set to make his own trilogy.
With Benioff and Weiss gone and with nobody the wiser on what Kevin Fiege and Rian Johnson are doing, Star Wars’s future is starting to muddle into mystery.
