There’s an alternate timeline in which we’re all building LEGO Star Wars: The Hunt for Ben Solo sets right now, and Disney deprived us of it for a reason that feels totally out of step with Star Wars.
While Kylo Ren met an untimely end in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, dying only moments after being redeemed as Ben Solo, actor Adam Driver told AP that he ‘always was interested in doing another Star Wars’. “I had been talking about doing another one since 2021,” he said. “Kathleen [Kennedy] had reached out. I always said: with a great director and a great story, I’d be there in a second. I loved that character and loved playing him.”
Driver, who starred as Kylo Ren across The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, even pitched a concept for a follow-up movie to the sequel trilogy to director Steven Soderbergh, who then outlined a story with Rebecca Blunt. Lucasfilm head honchos Kennedy, Dave Filoni and Cary Beck signalled their interest in the project, so Scott Z. Burns came on board to write the script, which Driver calls ‘one of the coolest… scripts I had ever been a part of’.
“We presented the script to Lucasfilm,” Driver added. “They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it. We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that. It was called ‘The Hunt for Ben Solo’ and it was really cool. But it is no more, so I can finally talk about it.”
It’s true that Ben dies at the end of Episode IX. But death is famously not a permanent state of being in Star Wars: see Darth Maul, Boba Fett and of course Emperor Palpatine, whose return was handwaved away in The Rise of Skywalker. If Maul can get himself some robot legs, if Boba can crawl out of the Sarlacc pit, and if Disney can bring back the Emperor without so much as a cursory explanation, why couldn’t Ben come back too?
Given it’s been a fair few years since all this took place, it’s not hard to imagine that had Disney given Driver and Soderbergh the green light, we’d all be gearing up to watch Star Wars: The Hunt for Ben Solo in cinemas this Christmas and building LEGO Star Wars Ben Solo sets right now. Instead, we’re staring down the barrel of another round of Mandalorian and Grogu-flavoured sets in 2026 (not confirmed yet, but doesn’t it feel inevitable?).
The slight consolation here is that there seems to be a real groundswell of support for a Ben Solo movie from the Star Wars community across the web. And you never know: with enough pressure, Disney might just reconsider greenlighting the script. Stranger things have happened. For his part, Soderbergh sounds like he’d still be on board, telling AP: “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.”
The Mandalorian & Grogu lands in cinemas on May 22, 2026. The only other Star Wars movie with a concrete release date is Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter, which stars Ryan Gosling, Mia Goth and Matt Smith, and is due to premiere on May 28, 2027.
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