Well, “Star Wars” fans, the rumors were true. In a new interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, screenwriter David S. Goyer confirmed he wrote not just one but two unproduced scripts for Lucasfilm. And one of those projects was a movie about Jabba The Hutt for Guillermo del Toro. For fans who don’t remember, GDT hinted he wanted to make a “The Godfather“-like movie for the Tattooine crime lord five or so years ago. Now, Goyer affirms that the project was very much a thing, but it never exited the earliest stages of development.
“I wrote an unproduced “Star Wars” movie that Guillermo del Toro was going to direct,” Goyer told host Josh Horowitz on the podcast. “It was about four years ago.” Goyer didn’t go into detail about the story itself, but said later on that “it’s a cool script.” “Have you hag Guillermo on the show”? asked Goyer, “You’ll have to ask him about it next time he’s on. It’s a cool script.” Del Toro confirmed Goyer’s comment by retweeting a video of the interview, saying, “True. Can’t Say Much. “Maybe two letters “J” and “BB” is that three letters?”
Back in 2015, del Toro told Yahoo Movies in an interview that he’d love to make a Jabba the Hutt movie at some point. ““This is not real —this is me as a fat geek just geeking out and talking about it,” he told the outlet. “I would do the sort of “Godfather‘“saga [about what] Jabba the Hutt had to go through to gain control. One, because it’s the character that looks the most like me, and I like him. I love the idea of a Hutt type of mafia, a very complex coup. I just love the character.” Then two years later, rumors swirled that Lucasfilm indeed had a spin-off featuring Hutt in the works. Nothing came of the story, however, although Jabba continued to be featured on the animated “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and got a shout-out in 2018’s “Solo.”
But what about Goyer’s other “Star Wars” scripts? That’s an even juicier bit of news. “I also wrote an unproduced …I have a “scriptment” for an origins of the Jedi movie, also for “Star Wars,” that I wrote, that took place 25,000 years before the first “Star Wars” film,” Goyer said on the podcast. That sounds like the upcoming movie James Mangold will helm confirmed at “Star Wars Celebration” earlier this year. Goyer didn’t give away whether or not Mangold’s film will base itself on the script he wrote, but there are obvious parallels. Besides, Goyer sounds like he’s not involved in anything related to Lucasfilm anymore. “Dabbling in “Star Wars” would have been fun for me,” he added. “There was just a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time.”
Still, a Jabba the Hutt spin-off movie like it would fit right into the model of similar “Star Wars” stories like “The Book Of Boba Fett” or “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” But most recent “Star Wars” projects lean away from the original trilogy to focus on Expanded Universe characters instead, or building out the world of the latest “Star Wars” film trilogy. Add in the lukewarm reception to “Solo,” and it’s unlikely Goyer’s Jabba script will ever see the light of day.
Del Toro could talk about the unmade project the next time he’s on “Happy Sad Confused,” so stay tuned on that. It’s easy to imagine that Goyer cooked up an excellent story for Jabba for del Toro to helm.