Steven Soderbergh’s The Hunt for Ben Solo Remark Ignites Calls for a Star Wars Snyder Cut

Disney nixed Steven Soderbergh’s finished pitch for Star Wars: The Hunt for Ben Solo—hailed by Adam Driver as one of the coolest scripts he’s worked on—the director revealed on BlueSky.

Steven Soderbergh finally said the quiet part out loud: he wrote a full Star Wars movie about Ben Solo, Lucasfilm was into it, and Disney still killed it. Yes, there was a real script. Yes, Adam Driver loved it. And yes, the whole thing died in a boardroom.

What Soderbergh owned up to

The director took to BlueSky to confirm he had a completed draft for a film called 'The Hunt for Ben Solo'. He says Lucasfilm approved the vision, but Disney passed anyway. By their telling, that makes this the first time Disney has binned a fully finished movie script that emerged from Lucasfilm.

"For the record, I did not enjoy lying about the existence of THE HUNT FOR BEN SOLO, but it really did need to remain a secret... until now!"

So why did Disney say no?

Adam Driver has called Soderbergh's script "one of the coolest" he has ever been part of. He also spelled out the sticking point: even though Ben Solo dies in 'The Rise of Skywalker', Soderbergh pitched a story that brings him back because, creatively, they felt the character had unfinished business. Lucasfilm got it. Disney boss Bob Iger and studio chief Alan Bergman did not. Driver says they simply could not get past the idea of Ben being alive, and that was the end of it. Soderbergh, for his part, has said he is just sorry fans will not get to see what he built in his head.

What the movie would have been (as much as anyone is saying)

No plot dump here, but the angle was a post-sequel Ben Solo story anchored by Driver, crafted by Soderbergh, and rubber-stamped at Lucasfilm before it hit the Disney wall. That is a wild chain of events, considering how tightly these things are usually controlled.

The quick version

• Soderbergh wrote a finished script titled 'The Hunt for Ben Solo'.
• Lucasfilm liked it and approved the pitch to move forward.
• Disney leadership (Bob Iger and Alan Bergman) rejected it over the Ben-is-alive hurdle.
• Adam Driver praised the script and was game to return with the right story and director.
• Fans have started pushing the #THEHUNTFORBENSOLO campaign, pointing to recent examples where studios reversed course under pressure.
• Soderbergh has been here before: his separate pitch for a Bond movie with Tony Gilroy was also turned down.

Fans are already rallying

There is a growing #THEHUNTFORBENSOLO push online. And look, studios do sometimes bend when the demand is loud and sustained. If enough people want to see Driver back under Soderbergh's direction, it is not impossible that this gets another look. These companies pay attention to numbers, and a chorus of fans is a number.

The bigger Star Wars picture

Since the sequel trilogy, the franchise's big-screen future has been murky. A familiar face returning under a filmmaker like Soderbergh would have been an easy thing for audiences to rally around. Instead, here we are, talking about what could have been.

If you want to revisit the era this would have followed, the Star Wars sequel trilogy is streaming on Disney+ in the US.