Since I am listening to THREE different Star Wars podcasts right now, this was an inevitability. As there is nothing Disney likes more than announcing projects that will never happen, I figured I could score some points by not wasting anyone’s time with false theatrics and skipping directly ahead to the part where they don’t exist.
1. The film focuses on a Sparticus-style slave revolt against the Hutts, led by Baduk the Klatoonian . The film follows the revolution over several years from the initial colosseum riots to the capture of the planet’s chief overseer, but ends in tragedy just short of success; Republic security forces and a detachment of Jedi are deployed against the revolutionaries, breaking their war effort before they are able to secure the planet’s primary spaceport. At the very end, as clone troopers fresh from Kamino dig mass graves for the revolutionaries, we learn that the Republic gauged that the Hutts’ continued cooperation is more valuable to the war effort against the Separatists than a new and unstable polity. “It has never been the Jedi’s role to free slaves,” one of the knights says matter-of-factly.
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2. A non-combat rebel cell runs Bochi’s Salvage and Repair as a front for distributing fake transport visas to people fleeing the Imperial occupation of their planet. The only human characters featured are the Imperials: everyone else is an alien. Trio of main characters: a twi’lek, a droid, and a vratix. (We will be throwing a bone to the boring assholes with the purse strings by having a basically-just-a-human alien as one of the leads, but she’ll be playing against typecasting: no one ever thinks about the twi’lek ex-dental assistants.)
Central to the plot is an attempt to smuggle an entire family of Force-sensitives onto an approaching cargo freighter while dodging the investigation of suspicious Imperial bureaucrats. While the family does escape, the film ends with the cell splitting up and going to ground, having lured the Imperial investigators into a trap with a jury-rigged spaceship engine.
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3. Set a few years pre-Phantom; two padawans mere weeks away from knighthood form an unlikely interspecies romance (let’s have some fun: a Caamasi and a…Sauvax). They are found out by a third party and reported to the Council, who puts the pressure on them to end the relationship quietly. Before they make their decision they are contacted by an anonymous figure, who reveals exactly how common these secret relationships are within the Order all the way up to the Council (If you ever wanted to know who Kit Fisto’s friend-with-benefits is, and whomst among us has not, this movie will provide you with answers.)
The pair are encouraged to go public with their story, serving as media figureheads and giving the whistleblower an opportunity to leak the data. The stranger frames this as part of their quest to reform the Order, believing it to be hypocritically focused on minor dogmas rather than actual institutional issues. The young lovers are persuaded, and decide to go to the media.
What follows is unfortunate, but predictable. The Order retaliates, using its considerable resources to bury the story and hide the leaks. The lovers are barred from knighthood, demoted to the Jedi Service Corps, and in an episode of spite that only Prequel Yoda could muster they are assigned to opposite sides of the galaxy.
But since I am a sucker for these sorts of things, we get a post-Endor epilogue where the two re-unite by coincidence / the Force; both of them respond to Luke’s call to any surviving Force adepts as he builds his academy. I want the audience bawling their god-damn eyes out over an elderly lobster-person.
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4. A character drama centered on an impoverished alien family on the Outer Rim as they weigh handing over their daughter to a passing Jedi knight. The family’s culture practices a native Force tradition centered on community and relationship (and is thus diametrically opposed to the Jedi and their repressive monasticism), but younger generations (such as one of the child’s parents) are more and more aligning themselves with the greater galactic supraculture in the hopes of eventually getting Republic membership to aid their struggling economy (this does not work out well). Offering up a new Jedi would be a step towards the betterment of all, or so they believe - encouraged along by the knight in question, who clearly has a horse in this race.
The Clone Wars are on the horizon, and with them the implicit doom.
(I originally wrote this before The Acolyte came out; fuck the Jedi)
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5. A war movie, all blood and guts and mud and wetwork. Rebel intelligence agents attempt to lock down an alliance with the inhabitants of a logistically-vital world, and find themselves dealing with alien partizans who have been fighting offworld incursions for generations and are none too happy to offer their support to the Republic’s government-in-exile. They’d fought the Hutts for centuries, and the Republic didn’t do shit for them. They’d fought against the CIS, failed, and then got invaded again by the Republic in retaliation. They’d fought against the Empire after the Republic fell. And now some liberal-ass core-worlders come along begging for help? Stuff it up your sphincter, Organa.
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6. A ship smuggling antiquities for gray market resale inadvertently ends up with a Sith holocron in its inventory. One of the crew members is just Force-sensitive enough to activate it, which then leads to a whole lot of fucked up Sith ghosts haunting a spaceship. The crew is picked off one by one, as is tradition, as the survivors attempt to scuttle the ship (save the Force-sensitive, who tries to exorcize it). As the survivors launch the escape pod with moments to spare, they look out the viewport to see that there’s no explosion despite what they did to the engines. With no-one at the helm, the ship enters hyperspace.
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7. An in-universe documentary about the New Republic’s war-crimes trials against Imperial officials. While the Herculean effort saw a good amount of success, the Empire was simply too big to bring its many millions to court; controversial amnesty declarations were granted to minor Imperial officials and bureaucrats, and eventually the Republic found itself unable to expend the resources needed to hunt down all those warlords who fled to the Outer Rim and Unknown Regions. That task was left to a panoply of paralegal and paramilitary groups, the most notable being the remnants of Wraith Squadron and other Rebellion-era units that merged into “Dumb Luck Division” under the command of Leia Organa.
8. The version of The Phantom Menace where they get Michelle Yeoh to play Qui-Gon and they do not waste her talent. And you know what, fuck it, Ahmed Best gets to be a Jedi. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are headed to Naboo to find out what happened to him.
9. The version of The Force Awakens where the attack on Maz’s Cantina is interrupted by a Yuuzhan Vong worldship jumping out of hyperspace in high orbit, at which point we leave the rails far behind us. We do not need them where we’re going.
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Well, there you have it. Part of what inspired all this is a conversation on A More Civilized Age, where the hosts digress for a bit about how Star Wars has consistently been disinterested in culture as a part of its world. The other part was rewatching The Force Awakens for the first time since 2016 and boy howdy did that movie not hold up. I am 100% serious that it should have been derailed by (a better version of) the Vong.
I really do go back to the well again and again for some of these topics, don't I?
