Adam Driver kicked up a bit of a shitstorm in the Star Wars universe this week, revealing that—in the midst of an extremely fallow period for the franchise in movie theaters—he and Steven Soderbergh had taken the time to cook up, for their own pleasure, a cool-sounding movie centered on Driver’s old pal Kylo Ren/Ben Solo. Said film apparently excited everybody who heard about it, right up until it was run straight into the thresher known as “Disney CEO Bob Iger.” Iger apparently shot the idea down purely on its premise—i.e., that Solo might still be alive after Rise Of Skywalker—and “that was that.”
But there’s nothing quite like a Star Wars fanbase scorned, and so now fans who’ve just learned about this project have already started making big, flashy gestures in defense of it. Specifically, Collider reports that somebody apparently rented a plane to fly over Disney headquarters with a banner trailing behind it, calling on the studio to “Save #TheHuntForBenSolo.” The banner was apparently organized by fan Lianna Al Allaf, who wanted Iger and his fellow executives to know “how much the character of Ben Solo means to so many of us, and that the fans really do want this movie.”
It feels like Driver must have known what he was doing when he aimed the fandom’s ire straight at Iger: In the interview, he makes it clear that pretty much everybody at Lucasfilm was onboard for the project, and that Iger (and fellow executive Alan Bergman) were the specific stumbling points. (They apparently hadn’t heard that you can bring characters back in this universe by just having Oscar Isaac mumble “Somehow, so-and-so returned.”) It’s very hard to imagine Iger about-facing on something like this—he’s made it clear that new Star Wars movies are going to be pretty much the safest bets possible, even as the series’ TV side has made ambitious swings like Andor—but, hey, we’ll take Star Wars fans being mad about a cool-sounding movie getting killed over Star Wars being mad that, like, women exist any day of the week.
