Normally, a canceled Star Wars movie would not cause a disturbance in the Force, but not all canceled Star Wars movies are The Hunt For Ben Solo. Revealed earlier this week by Adam Driver, The Hunt For Ben Solo would’ve portrayed the continued adventures of his character, Ben Solo, after the events of Rise Of Skywalker. Described by the actor as “one of the coolest fucking scripts I had ever been a part of,” Driver enlisted Stephen Soderbergh to direct, and the pair submitted a script by Scott Z. Burns, who wrote Bourne Ultimatum and The Informant!, as well as some uncredited work on Rogue One. Though it was greenlit, it wasn’t meant to be. Disney CEO Bob Iger put the kibosh on The Hunt because he didn’t understand how Solo could’ve survived The Rise Of Skywalker. “No one’s ever really gone” except for Ben Solo, apparently.
Emboldened by the successful attempts to save the Snyder Cut in 2020, which resulted in $70 million being poured into finishing Zach Snyder’s Justice League, Star Wars fans have begun bullying Disney into giving them the canceled Star Wars movie they’ve been dreaming of all week. A mere three days after Driver broke the news that there’s another canceled Star Wars movie that we didn’t even know about, fans rented a plane to fly a banner over Disney headquarters that reads, “Save #TheHuntForBenSolo.” Today, Collider reports, a fan named B.D. Neagle paid for a Times Square billboard encouraging Disney to make the movie. Against a starry background and in blue Star Wars font (which looks more Trek than Wars, but we’re going to let it go), the sign reads, “For Adam. No one’s ever really gone. Hope lives. Ben is alive! #THBS.” The billboard is above Carlos Bakery at 1500 Broadway in New York City and can be viewed as you’re walking over there.
“The intent was to show Disney this is what fans actually want. ‘No one’s ever really gone,’ I believe, says it all,” Neagle told Collider. “If they could bring back Palpatine with one line, there are plenty of ways Ben could return that already fit into Star Wars lore. What makes this fight for Ben Solo different is that we know a finished script exists. There was a director attached, and Adam Driver himself had been looking for a way to tell Ben’s story. It’s no longer simply wanting a character to return. It’s about fighting for a story that was ready to be told. We know it’s out there, and because of that, we’re not giving up. We want Disney to know they made a mistake. It’s not often the Star Wars fandom agrees and that alone should tell them something.”
Neagle is right about that. It isn’t every day that Star Wars fans agree, and this is the first canceled Star Wars project in recent memory that fans have gone out of their way to support. This reminds us, whatever happened to that Rey movie?
