Recently, Adam Driver casually revealed that he was developing a Kylo Ren-centric Star Wars film alongside the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Rebecca Blunt, and Scott Z. Burns before it was unceremoniously canceled by Disney head Bob Iger. That has, understandably, incited a passionate reaction from the fan base.
It’s not every day that an acclaimed, award-winning actor from a big blockbuster franchise just off-the-cuff reveals that they’ve been independently developing a new story for their character, and roping in Academy Award-winning filmmakers to help them out. Not to mention that despite all of this legwork from Driver and co., Disney was apparently unable to muster up even the vaguest of enthusiasm for the project, despite seemingly greenlighting every other Star Wars movie pitch they’ve heard over the past several years, regardless of if the project ever even comes to fruition.
All of this is genuinely insane stuff, in uncharted territory, serving to further highlight what a unicorn Adam Driver is as a performer and a creative. He is seemingly just as passionate about his role in a galaxy far, far away as he is about starring in off-kilter passion projects like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis or Leos Carax’s Annette, which is just kind of beautiful when you stop to think about it.
Funnily enough, it all stemmed from a single impulse: Adam Driver kind of hates The Rise of Skywalker.
That 2019 film was supposed to wrap up the Star Wars sequel trilogy, but did such an infamously heinous job that it became the worst received Star Wars film in history, with critics and fans alike. The J.J. Abrams-directed trilogy-capper saw the franchise being pulled in every conceivable direction, desperately attempting to appease everyone and satisfying literally no one in the process.
Apparently, this very much included Adam Driver himself, as the AP article in which Driver dropped the bombshell news about developing a follow-up details that, “Driver had undertaken the trilogy with an arc in mind for Ren that inverted the journey of Darth Vader, As the trilogy evolved, it didn’t play out that way. Driver felt there was unfinished business for Kylo Ren, or as he was known before turning to the Dark Side, Ben Solo.”
It is worth noting that while Driver has remained a consummate professional and refrained from speaking ill of his Star Wars films in public or in the press, there have certainly been clues before this that the actor was unhappy with The Rise of Skywalker.
During the filming and releasing of the sequel trilogy, Driver was famous for not watching his own films, finding watching himself on-screen “painful.” However, that changed post-Rise of Skywalker, when the actor was quoted as saying, “I started watching everything,” because he felt the need to be able to “defend” his performance in any given film.
Clearly, the conclusion to Ben Solo’s story in The Rise of Skywalker did not sit well with Driver, because as he tells it, it was less than three years later when he first began frequenting Lucasfilm again in the hopes of gaining traction for a follow-up that could set things right. Alas, Bob Iger in his infinite wisdom elected not to move forward with The Hunt for Ben Solo, so instead of getting a wild passion project from Adam Driver and Steven Soderbergh, it appears as if the actor and audiences alike will have to live with Rise of Skywalker as the character’s conclusion for the foreseeable future.