Star Wars is in a strange place right now. Under the joint leadership forces of the Walt Disney Corporation and Lucasfilm, the once revered cinematic franchise has spent the last seven years now adamantly steering away from theatrically released installments. Instead, as its parent company pivoted to streaming and searched for new releases to help drive attention to the freshly launched platform Disney+, Star Wars became an exclusively streaming-based franchise for several years. The property, which had never had a live-action TV show in the entirety of its first 40+ years of existence, suddenly had more TV shows than anyone knew what to do with. And that slew of ‘content’ undeniably hampered excitement surrounding the franchise.
But now, in 2026, Star Wars is trying to get things back on track in a big way. Not only is The Mandalorian and Grogu releasing this summer, the first foray back to cinema screens since 2019, but both Disney and Lucasfilm are in the midst of undergoing substantial management changes. Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan are taking the reins at Lucasfilm, while Josh D’Amaro is taking over the House of Mouse. With this new leadership comes the opportunity for meaningful change across multiple fronts, and one of the best things that these new leaders could do would be to greenlight the formerly canned Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver film, The Hunt for Ben Solo.
A few months back, Driver revealed that he and revered filmmaker Steven Soderbergh had been working together on a Star Wars script that would see the return of his character, Kylo Ren a.k.a. Ben Solo. However, the film had been scrapped altogether by former Disney head Bob Iger, who apparently was unable to comprehend why or how that character would be alive following The Rise of Skywalker. Lunacy of that excuse aside, Driver’s comments were shortly followed by Soderbergh publicly corroborating the story, and talking about how much he still longed to make the film.
This generated a groundswell of support for Driver and Soderbergh, from fans who longed to see exactly such a Star Wars story on the big screen. Following the lackluster sendoff that was Rise of Skywalker, Disney and Lucasfilm had all but entirely steered away from sequel trilogy characters. But from this response, it became clear that fans still feel passionately about these characters and this era of the story, and want to see the wrongs of that awful 2019 film righted in some meaningful way.
To this end, one of the smartest things that Dave Filoni could do to win fans over is to greenlight The Hunt for Ben Solo, pronto. One of the primary concerns that many fans hold about Filoni taking over Lucasfilm is that he may make Star Wars too insular, reliant upon niche references and work centered on his own past-facing characters. But greenlighting The Hunt for Ben Solo would set a strong precedent for things to come, showing that he isn’t afraid to take risks and tell new stories with future-facing characters in new eras of the franchise.
So come on, Dave. What are you waiting for?