A Long Lost Star Wars TV Show Could Inform A Standalone Han Solo Movie
Young Solo emerges from the Underworld.
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Earlier today we wrote about Star Wars vet Lawrence Kadsan (The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi) writing the script for the Boba Fett-based standalone film that’s coming after Episode VII drops in 2015. Godzilla director Gareth Edwards will direct the first spinoff, while Chronicle’s Josh Trank will play the same role for the second. That film will supposedly revolve around the early days of everyone’s favorite scruffy Nerf Herder, Han Solo. While that project is still way off in the distance, supposedly it won’t come down until 2018, it may draw heavily from a discarded Lucasfilm project called Star Wars Underworld.
Underworld is one of those mythical pieces of Star Wars lore that we’ve heard rumblings about for years but never actually seen. It was originally supposed to be a live action television show. Eventually the show was abandoned because, economically speaking, it would have been insanely unfeasible to film a weekly, serialized show of this magnitude. But according to Slashfilm, who did some digging into the matter, this could figure prominently into the Han Solo movie.
The scripts for Underworld came along as part of the package when Disney purchased Lucasfilm a few years ago. According to Stephen Scaia, who was a writer on the project, many of the stories include key elements of Han’s history and backstory. This incorporate moments like how he met his furry BFF Chewbacca, how he came to win the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, making the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, and that sort of thing. What would a young Chewie be like? I imagine these early days as looking like that series of pictures that made the rounds a while back that imagined Star Wars playing out as a high school drama.
While it seems entirely plausible that some of this material could be cannibalized for the solo Han movie, there’s also a possibility you could see some of it pop up in Star Wars: Rebels. The animated series is set after Revenge of the Sith, but goes down few years before the events of A New Hope. This is when the Empire really tightens its grip and the Rebel Alliance begins to form, so the time frame could very well fit. We’ve also heard that Obi Wan Kenobi could make an appearance in Rebels, so why not other familiar faces as well? This is all speculation, so odds are nothing will come of this, but these are all things to consider.
