Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh has made it quite clear that he’s not interested in returning to work on his abandoned Star Wars project, The Hunt For Ben Solo, despite leadership changes at both Lucasfilm and Disney hinting a second life for the rejected project could be a possibility, and Star Wars superfans still trying to persuade Disney to make it.
“Nope,” was Soderbergh’s one-word answer, as reported by The Playlist.
Soderbergh, who picked up an Oscar for 2000’s Traffic and directed Out of Sight, Contagion, and the Ocean’s trilogy, went on to clarify the idea for Star Wars: The Hunt for Ben Solo came entirely from star Adam Driver himself, and that he doesn’t regret “one minute of the time we spent working on that.”
“I felt the work was good,” said Soderbergh. “It’s just good for you to be in that room and working on it. It’s like CrossFit – it’s good for you. It’ll have a residual effect that will be unexpected at some point.”
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He did, however, stress that he had moved on from the project, noting that “if it was gonna happen, it would have happened.”
“It’s that simple,” he said.
“As soon as it became apparent, okay, not gonna happen, I sat down and started writing [something else]. It’s like, ‘Okay, new scenario, let’s get cracking.’ At a certain point, it’s like complaining about the weather. You just gotta keep moving.”
News that Disney had been kicking the tyres on a Ben Solo movie starring Adam Driver first emerged in October 2025, when the Kylo Ren actor revealed that the project had been in the works for over two years. The project was eventually rejected, and is reportedly the only completed script to date that Disney has turned down for a Lucasfilm project.
Hardcore fans of the Star Wars sequels have been striving to have the project resurrected ever since, even going as far as to fly “Save The Hunt for Ben Solo” banners over Walt Disney Studios in California. Earlier this year, departing Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy called the Ben Solo script “just great” and cryptically noted that “anything’s a possibility if somebody’s willing to take a risk.”
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
