Here’s The “Dark, Sexy” Star Wars Show We Never Got To See
“It would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe.”
Star Wars is among the most beloved franchises ever made, but it’s taken the saga a long time to translate its success to the small screen. After 40 years and a few failed attempts, The Mandalorian and its many spin-offs helped establish Lucasfilm as a streaming presence while expanding the galaxy into an interconnected saga more in line with Marvel’s cinematic universe. It’s a feat that was harder than it looked, given Lucasfilm’s past attempts to break into live-action TV.
For years, fans have been curious about Star Wars: Underworld, a failed live-action series George Lucas was working on for ABC. According to producer Ron Moore, Underworld would have bridged the gap between the Star Wars prequels and the original trilogy, while taking the saga in a decidedly adult direction.
“I think we had over 60 scripts,” Moore recently told the Young Indy Chroniclers podcast. The episodes, penned by a “phenomenal group of talent,” were “dark,” “sexy,” and more violent than any prior Star Wars project. Underworld “would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe,” Moore said, before adding, “Disney definitely would have never offered to buy [Lucasfilm]” had the series gotten the green light.
Three years before the Star Wars sequels, Lucasfilm was working on a “dark” and “sexy” TV series.
Underworld was canceled in 2012, the same year Disney acquired Lucasfilm, but it wasn’t the content that inspired ABC to ax the series; it was the budget. “The problem was, each episode was bigger than the films,” Moore said. “The lowest I could get it down to, with the technology that existed then, was about $40 million an episode.”
Even in the streaming age, as studios (Lucasfilm included!) spare no expense on prestige TV, $40 million is a ludicrous amount of cash to blow on a single episode. But the industry has since made major strides with visual effects, and were it made today, Underworld likely wouldn’t cost nearly as much as those early estimates.
For what it’s worth, Moore is open to bringing the series out of production purgatory. “It was fun to go work on the abortive live-action show that I did way back when,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “I got a tremendous amount of thrill writing lines for Darth Vader in one episode, and it would be fun to do that again.” Moore added that he does have a few other ideas in his back pocket, and that there are “corners of the Star Wars” universe he’d like to “poke around” in.
Unfortunately, it’s been over four years since Moore expressed interest in returning to that galaxy far away, and the odds of Disney+ reviving his Star Wars pitch are pretty slim. He’s no longer working with Disney on a Swiss Family Robinson reboot, instead focusing on an upcoming Outlander spinoff, a live-action God of War adaptation, and another season of Apple TV’s For All Mankind. For now, Underworld lives only in the imaginations of Star Wars fans, but maybe one day a version of that grim-dark Star Wars story will find its way into the light.
