McCallum Reflects On “Star Wars Underworld”

In late 2019 came the launch of “The Mandalorian,” the first live-action “Star Wars” series to grace the screen and a series that had to utilise the then revolutionary StageCraft video wall technology in order to be able to pull it all off.

Even then, the show was fairly costly – coming in at $15 million per episode. It was subsequently beaten by “Andor” which reportedly costs more, but it’s not clear by how much. Both shows would have easily been beaten to the title of the most-expensive “Star Wars” series had earlier small screen plans for the franchise gone through.

Before Disney acquired Lucasfilm, filmmaker George Lucas was working on a TV series titled “Star Wars: Underworld” which was set in the period between the prequel and original trilogies.

At the time, it was said that around fifty or sixty scripts were being written, with the plan being for multiple seasons of the show which was primarily set on Coruscant. Concerns over cost led to the series, and the related “Star Wars 1313” video game, to be shelved. All we got out of it was some test footage which leaked a few years ago.

Now, former “Star Wars” franchise producer Rick McCallum recently shared new details on the series in an interview for the Young Indy Chronicles podcast (via SFFGazette.com) and revealed that each episode would’ve cost a minimum of $40 million to produce – meaning an overall 60-episode budget of $2.4 billion:

“I think we had over 60 scripts. Third-draft scripts. Again, the most wonderful writers in the world on it. And again, we created exactly the same experience for everybody at [Skywalker] Ranch, and again just a phenomenal group of talent.

And these were dark. They were sexy, they were violent, they were just absolutely wonderful. Wonderful, complicated, challenging. I mean, it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe and Disney definitely would have never offered George to buy it [Laughs]. But it’s one of the great disappointments of our life.

The problem was each episode was bigger than the films, so the lowest I could get it down to with the technology that existed then was about 40 million an episode.”

In addition, the plan had been for John Williams to score each episode. Previously, writer and producer Ronald D. Moore (“Battlestar Galactica,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”) indicated the show had an overarching series long arc combined with episodic events. He also said writers really had no budget constraints and so went “crazy and big”.

Lucasfilm hasn’t made any moves towards resurrecting the series since the Disney acquisition, those scripts simply locked away from the public for now.

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