Guillermo del Toro reveals details of his cancelled Star Wars movie

Guillermo del Toro has confirmed he was at one point working on a standalone movie in the Star Wars universe, anchored around everyone’s favourite gangster slug from a galaxy far, far away.

By this point, there may be more cancelled Star Wars movies than released Star Wars movies, from Josh Trank’s Boba Fett film to Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron. Guillermo del Toro has now confirmed another casualty on that list, revealing to Collider that he once teamed up with screenwriter David S. Goyer to flesh out a story that would have chronicled ‘the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt’.

“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 going to realize where you’re going.”

The timeline is a little fuzzy, but Collider suggests del Toro – the filmmaker behind Pacific Rim, Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy – moved on to 2017’s The Shape of Water after his Jabba movie fell through, which suggests that particular iron may have been in the fire even before The Force Awakens arrived on screens in 2015. Negotiations around the project reportedly took place during the period Disney was intending to run amok with Star Wars spin-offs (eventually resulting in Rogue One and Solo).

Exactly what the movie would have involved isn’t clear, either: surely the fall of Jabba the Hutt is the bit in Return of the Jedi where Princess Leia snuffs him out with a chain, and then his big boat explodes? Maybe it would have led directly into Episode VI in the same way Rogue One ends right as A New Hope begins. Given how far out we are from this film getting the chop, we’ll probably never know.

This will be disappointing news to Jabba fans, though – all 12 of them invested in the idea of a movie that casts a largely immobile space slug as its protagonist – and especially for anyone still longing for the return of the crime lord to the LEGO Star Wars line-up, from which the Hutt has been absent since 2013’s 75020 Jabba’s Sail Barge. 

Fingers crossed the LEGO Group finds reason to revisit Return of the Jedi’s opening sequence in the near future regardless. (Whatever happened to that rumoured diorama…?)

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