After years of having no new Star Wars content outside the realm of comic books, fans are now getting an avalanche of the same, and this is thanks to Disney as they want to capitalize on the $4 billion investment. We are going to get a lot of movies over the next few years and some animated TV shows as well, but there is hope that Disney will get to making a live-action Star Wars TV series too.
Cory Balrog, who directed God of War video games, had an in-depth interview with Venture Beat and the time spent for LucasArts. He had revealed that he read some scripts for the Star Wars TV series and said that it focused on how Emperor Palpatine became The Emperor:
“Probably the really small beginnings of this idea, the germination of this – when I was working at Lucas, I was allowed to go up to the ranch and read the scripts for the [canceled live-action Star Wars] TV show. It was the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever experienced. I cared about the Emperor. They made the Emperor a sympathetic figure who was wronged by this f***ing heartless woman. She’s this hardcore gangster, and she just totally destroyed him as a person. I almost cried while reading this. This is the Emperor, the lightning out of the fingers Emperor. That’s something magical. The writers who worked on that, guys from The Shield and 24, these were excellent writers.”
Very little is known about Star Wars: Underworld, which was the rumored title for the series. Star Wars fans find it interesting to think of the idea of Palpatine as a sympathetic character, as very he is now 100 percent vile. The root of his evil came from a “heartless woman,” and he had to tear Anakin Skywalker apart from Padme to get him to be Darth Vader.
The journey of Star Wars: Underworld dated all the way back to 2005 and was a baby of George Lucas, who was planning on using this series to follow up his Star Wars prequel. Many writers had been hired for the show, and there are more than 50 scripts at Skywalker ranch. The project stalled out due to budget constraints. But Lucas spoke about this during an interview in 2008 with Total Film:
“It’s kind of like Episode IV – it’s funny, and there’s action, but it’s [a] lot more talky. It’s more of what I would call a soap opera with a bunch of personal dramas in it. It’s not really based on action-adventure films from the ’30s – it’s actually more based on film noir movies from the ’40s!”
Underworld had hit a dead stop in 2010, and when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, it put the nail in the coffin as they wanted to focus on the movie and merchandising.
Disney will pursue a Live-Action TV series revolving around Star Wars, but fans are going to have to wait for a while to see it actually take off.
