Obi-Wan Kenobi Was Planned As A Film Trilogy Says Writer

Obi-Wan Kenobi is already in the rear-view, and it turns out fans who have been discussing whether the series might have been better as a standalone film were onto something. The project’s original writer when it was intended to be a film, Stuart Beattie, told The Direct in an interview that there were plans for a full trilogy focusing on the character–until Solo’s disappointing box office performance.

“I wrote the film that they based the show on,” Beattie said. “I spent like a year, year-and-a-half working on it. And then, when the decision was made not to make any more spin-off films after Solo came out, I left the project and went on to other things. [Screenwriter Joby Harold] came on and took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six. So, I did not work with them at all, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff.”

Beattie added that in his original Obi-Wan pitch to Lucasfilm, there were “three stories because there’s three different evolutions that the character has to make in order to go from Obi-Wan to Ben [in A New Hope].” He then elaborated on the core stories for the intended trilogy, which wound up becoming the show’s first three episodes.

However, as Beattie noted, the original plan for a “full trilogy”–with Ewan McGregor onboard–were scrapped after Solo. It’s unclear if something like this can realistically happen anymore within the franchise, as back in May Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said in an interview that the company plans to no longer cast new actors in the role of classic Star Wars characters. Speaking with Vanity Fair, Kennedy specifically pointed to Solo as the teachable moment with this lesson. Reflecting directly on the re-casting in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which put actors Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover in the roles of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian respectively, saying: “Now it does seem so abundantly clear that we can’t do that.”