Before Lucasfilm fell into the hands of Disney, George Lucas had a much darker, more adult project in the Star Wars universe in mind. The ambitious series Star Wars: Underworld was supposed to take viewers into the dark corners of Coruscant, with mafia showdowns in the spirit of Peaky Blinders, corruption, and criminal masterminds similar to Walter White.
100 episodes and a dark story
The director did not intend to limit himself to a dozen episodes, his goal was grandiose: 100 episodes with a huge budget of $ 40 million each (and this was in the 2000s, even now 4 billion per series is an exorbitant amount). This could have made the project the most expensive show of all time.
A 60-page script was ready, and the music was planned to be written by John Williams himself.
Star Wars without Jedi
Underworld was supposed to be the most adult chapter of the saga, focusing not on the Jedi and Sith, but on the lives of criminal organizations, smugglers and spies of the Empire, like the Hutt clan.
Everything took place in the lower levels of Coruscant, where the sun does not shine, but the most dangerous representatives of the galaxy far, far away hide. The atmosphere is in the spirit of noir and crime dramas, with intrigues in the spirit of The Godfather and Breaking Bad.
Why it all fell through
It seemed like the project was ready to go, but the visual effects required for such a large-scale series would have been very expensive. Studios simply didn’t know how to make Star Wars for TV without spending astronomical amounts of money.
In 2012, rather than continue to work on the project, Lucas decided to sell the studio to Disney. From that moment on, the direction of the franchise changed dramatically: instead of a dark crime noir in a serial format, we got a light and mass-audience-oriented trilogy with Rey and BB-8. Although there are flashes in the spirit of Andor, as well as failures in the style of The Book of Boba Fett.
