Star Wars: Underworld was a hugely ambitious project imagined by George Lucas as the first live-action TV series set in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Dozens of scripts were written, but making it proved to be something of a logistical nightmare for Lucasfilm.
Ultimately, it fell by the wayside alongside several other small screen projects when Disney acquired the studio. Since then, we've seen the Kathleen Kennedy-led studio produce several shows for Disney+, including The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
We know the series was set on Coruscant and, as the title implies, it was going to explore the planet's Underworld at the height of the Empire's rule.
Little else is known beyond that but former Star Wars franchise producer Rick McCallum has shared some new details (via SFFGazette.com), including the fact each episode was going to cost $40 million to produce.
Considering 60 of them were planned, you can probably see why Lucasfilm struggled to find a network willing to develop it...and to save you doing the math, that's a total budget of $2.4 billion.
"I think we had over 60 scripts. Third-draft scripts," McCallum says in the video below. "Again, the most wonderful writers in the world on it. And again, we created exactly the same experience for everybody at [Skywalker] Ranch, and again just a phenomenal group of talent."
"And these were dark. They were sexy, they were violent, they were just absolutely wonderful. Wonderful, complicated, challenging. I mean, it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe and Disney definitely would have never offered George to buy it [Laughs]," he continued. "But it’s one of the great disappointments of our life."
"But the problem was each episode was bigger than the films, so the lowest I could get it down to with the technology that existed then was about 40 million an episode."
The plan had been for John Williams to score each episode and it does feel like we missed out on something really interesting here. Of course, with Lucas' vision for the Star Wars prequels proving so divisive, who knows what this series would have been when all was said and done?
In 2020, writer and producer Ronald D. Moore revealed, "I think it was pretty much one big storyline. It was one long tale with episodic things that would happen. You know, there would be certain events [that] would happen in this episode or this episode, so it was sort of an episodic quality to some of it. But it was telling a larger narrative, in terms of the story of those particular characters in that setting."
However, he also confirmed, "We really had no [budget] constraints...we just went, ‘For this pass, OK let’s just take him at his word just to make it crazy and big’ and there was lots of action, lots of sets, and huge set pieces."
Lucasfilm hasn't revisited Star Wars Underworld and decided not to use Lucas' outlines for the Star Wars sequel trilogy. As a result, those 60 scripts are likely to remain locked away in the studio's vaults.
You can hear more from McCallum in the player below.