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    "headline": "Adam Driver says ‘the ship has sailed’ on The Hunt for Ben Solo, his shelved Star Wars film",
    "description": "Driver says he and Steven Soderbergh spent two years on the script before Disney's Bob Iger and Alan Bergman rejected it, and fans even flew a banner plane over Disney's studios.",
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    "keywords": "Adam Driver, Kylo Ren, Lucasfilm, Star Wars, Steven Soderbergh",
    "articleBody": "Adam Driver is done waiting on Ben Solo. Asked in a talk-show interview this week whether the shelved Star Wars film he built with director Steven Soderbergh could still come back, the actor shrugged it off: “I think the ship has sailed, though.” The project, called The Hunt for Ben Solo, was meant to bring back the character Driver played across the sequel trilogy, even though Ben dies at the end of 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. Lucasfilm liked it. Disney’s top executives did not. “No more Star Wars,” Driver said in the new interview. He explained that the team had tried to make one more, but the answer from above was simple: in his telling, the bosses’ view was that “he’s dead.” Two years of work, one meeting Driver described the effort as serious, not a passing idea. He said the group worked on it “really and earnestly” for two years and ended up with a script he called really good, written with Scott Z. Burns and Rebecca Blunt, the pen name Soderbergh’s wife Jules Asner uses on his films. Would he come back if someone revived it? “It’s not our call,” he said, before adding the line that has fans talking again. He did make a point of thanking the people who campaigned for the film. “The fans’ response to it, though, was pretty incredible,” Driver said, recalling that supporters paid for billboards and even flew planes over Disney. From pitch to “no”: the timeline The story of this unmade movie stretches across five years. Here is how it played out, based on what Driver and Soderbergh have said publicly. 2019: Ben Solo turns away from the dark side, saves Rey with the last of his life force and dies in The Rise of Skywalker, the final chapter of the sequel trilogy. 2021: Driver and Soderbergh pitch a story set after that ending to Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy, executive Cary Beck and creative chief Dave Filoni respond warmly, and Burns is hired to write. The next two years: The script takes shape. Driver later called it “one of the coolest (expletive) scripts I had ever been a part of.” The rejection: The pitch goes up to Disney CEO Bob Iger and co-chairman Alan Bergman. “They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that,” Driver recalled. October 2025: Driver reveals the shelved film by name for the first time. Soderbergh adds in a statement: “I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.” Days later: Fans hire a plane to tow a banner reading “Save the Hunt for Ben Solo” over Disney’s studios, part of a wider push that also included billboards. November 2026: Driver says the project is over and the ship has sailed. Why Disney balked The sticking point was never the quality of the pages. By Driver’s own account, Lucasfilm understood the angle the team was going for. The objection was story logic: the character’s death closes the trilogy, and the people with the final say could not picture him alive again. That leaves a strange footnote for one of the franchise’s most talked-about villains. Driver won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Force Awakens, the first Star Wars actor since Alec Guinness to take that prize, and he still voices Kylo Ren on the Rise of the Resistance rides at the Disney parks in Orlando and Anaheim. What Driver is doing instead His calendar is full without a lightsaber. Driver stars with Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller in James Gray’s crime drama Paper Tiger, and he is expected to start work on Michael Mann’s Heat 2 next month. Paper Tiger opens in US theaters on November 13. Further reading Wikipedia: Kylo Ren Image: Bryan Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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