Adam Driver said he spent years pushing for another Star Wars project built around Kylo Ren, only to have Disney reject a film that would have brought Ben Solo back after The Rise of Skywalker. The actor said Kathleen Kennedy reached out, he brought the idea to Steven Soderbergh, and the project moved far enough to get a script before Bob Iger and Alan Bergman shut it down.
The timing matters because Driver said he had been talking about another Star Wars project since 2021, long after the sequel trilogy ended with The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. That film, which followed The Force Awakens in 2015 and The Last Jedi in 2017, crossed $1 billion at the global box office and closed the story of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron and Kylo Ren. Driver said he was drawn back by the character and the chance to work with a strong director and story, adding that he would have returned “in a second.”
Driver said he brought a post-The Rise of Skywalker concept centered on Kylo Ren to Soderbergh, who then worked with Rebecca Blunt to outline a story pitched to Kennedy, Cary Beck and Dave Filoni. Scott Z. Burns was brought in to write a script, which Driver called one of the coolest he had encountered. Lucasfilm liked the idea and understood the angle behind it, he said, but the project ran into the same obstacle that ended it: Iger and Bergman said no, explaining that they did not see how Ben Solo was alive.
That leaves the sequel-era corner of Star Wars still open in other formats, even as the film version stayed sealed off. Lucasfilm has already kept expanding that era through comics, novels and television, and a recent comic adaptation of The Rise of Skywalker changed parts of the movie’s ending. But the proposed Ben Solo film appears to have gone as far as a serious internal pitch can go without becoming real, and the reason it stopped was simple: Disney leadership would not accept the return.
