Before George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and the “Star Wars” rights to Disney, he had attempted to put together an extremely ambitious television project called “Star Wars: Underworld” and according to longtime producer Rick McCallum (“Indiana Jones” and “Star Wars” franchises) there were some headache-inducing costs involved because of the limited technology at the time.
McCallum spoke with the podcast “Young Indy Chronicles” (spotted by Gizmodo) detailing how many scripts they compiled during their pained and long development period alongside what each episode would have cost them using the VFX tech of the day.
“I think we had over sixty scripts. Third-draft scripts,” McCallum said of the volume of work put together for “Star Wars: Underworld.” “Again, the most wonderful writers in the world on it. And again, we created exactly the same experience for everybody at [Skywalker] Ranch, and again just a phenomenal group of talent.”
“And these were dark. They were sexy, they were violent, they were just absolutely wonderful. Wonderful, complicated, challenging. I mean, it would have blown up the whole ‘Star Wars’ universe and Disney definitely would have never offered George to buy it [laughs]. But it’s one of the great disappointments of our life. But the problem was each episode was bigger than the films, so the lowest I could get it down to with the technology that existed then was about 40 million an episode.”
40 million per episode would easily eclipse what Disney+ is currently spending on their “Star Wars” shows (which is already a hefty amount of cash) and given that sixty-episode count to complete it would have cost an insane $2.4 billion.
“Star Wars: Underworld” was expected to be a much darker and more mature take, as alluded to by McCallum, on the popular family-friendly IP than anyone would have been used to. Obviously, the project never happened and in the wake of it we got Disney’s huge push on the small screen and we’re curious if “Underworld” would have had the same impact on audiences as the modern streaming shows.
You can hear McCallum’s “Star Wars: Underworld” snippet below.
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