Andor season 2 will soon arrive on Disney+. If it’s anywhere near as good as season one it’s going to be worth every penny. It better be considering how many pennies Lucasfilm spent making the show. How can a single TV series cost that much? It’s expensive to bring the galaxy far, far away to television. That’s something George Lucas himself once learned. A Lucasfilm producer said before Disney bought the company Lucas’ planned live-action Star Wars TV series would have cost $40 million an episode. At that price tag he said it “would’ve blown up” the entire franchise. Here’s what we learned about George Lucas’ Star Wars TV series that never was.
Rick McCallum, who served as a producer at Lucasfilm under George Lucas, recently stopped by the “Young Indy Chronicles” podcast. (Which we heard about at Variety.) During his appearance, he discussed Lucas’ plans for what would have been the first live-action television series in franchise history, Star Wars: Underworld. We’ve long known about the show, which would have taken place between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy. What we didn’t know is that this TV show might might have ended Star Wars forever.
McCallum says they were very far along in the process of creating George Lucas’ Star Wars series, with “over 60 scripts” already into their third drafts from the “most wonderful writers in the world.” He also described them as “dark,” “sexy,” and “violent.” He also said they “were absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging scripts.” Well, that makes Lucas’ Star Wars show sound pretty great.
So what went wrong, and why is the abandoned Star Wars series “one of the great disappointments” of McCallum’s life? McCallum said every episode of Lucas’ planned Star Wars show “was bigger than the films.” With the tech available at the time, he couldn’t get the cost for each episode under $40 million. And at that price, 60 scripts would have cost $2.4 billion. And that was 15 years ago. Phew.
No wonder McCallum says Underworld “would’ve blown up the whole Star Wars universe and Disney would’ve definitely never offered George Lucas to buy the franchise.” The Mouse House bought all of Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion total.
George Lucas’ Star Wars: Underworld could have been the greatest TV show in history, and it wouldn’t have justified a price tag like that. No show could. But we reserve the right to change our opinion after we see Andor season 2.
Content shared from nerdist.com.