George Lucas’ Scrapped STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD Would Have Cost Billions; New Details Revealed
In the ever-expanding world of Star Wars, few unrealized projects have sparked as much curiosity as Star Wars: Underworld. It was George Lucas’ ambitious attempt to bring a live-action series to television, diving deep into the gritty criminal underbelly of Coruscant.
The show was in development long before Disney took over Star Wars, but it never made it past the planning stage. Now, Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum has shed new light on just how massive and expensive this project really was.
Speaking on The Young Indy Chronicles podcast, McCallum confirmed that they had over 60 third-draft scripts ready to go. And if you thought The Mandalorian pushed Star Wars storytelling in bold new directions, Underworld would’ve gone even further.
“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 series was to be set between Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. It was going to be a gangster drama that was likened to Deadwood and The Godfather in space. It was also described as being The Empire Strikes Back on steroids.
A Godfather-style Star Wars crime drama sounds like it would’ve been awesome, but the reality of production costs killed it before it could take off.
McCallum estimated that each episode would have cost a staggering $40 million to produce, which is an unheard-of number at the time.
“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.”
For some perspective, Underworld was envisioned as a 400-episode series. Even with just 60 episodes budgeted out, that’s a jaw-dropping $2.4 billion. By comparison, modern big-budget series like Game of Thrones or The Mandalorian cost anywhere between $10 million to $20 million per episode.
Even the most expensive shows today, like Rings of Power, which reportedly cost around $60 million per episode, are only just now approaching those kinds of numbers.
It’s easy to see why Underworld never made it to production. The technology just wasn’t there to make Lucas’ vision financially feasible. But as Star Wars continues to expand on Disney+, and with visual effects pipelines becoming more efficient, it seems like a project like Underworld could be possible to make today.
When previously talking about the project Kathleen Kennedy said: “Interestingly enough, that's an area we’ve spent a lot of time, reading through the material that he developed is something we very much would like to explore.
“And there was 1313 the game, where there was…unbelievable. So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold. And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”
For now, Star Wars: Underworld remains one of the greatest “what ifs” in the franchise’s history, and I would love it if Lucasfilm actually decided to produce it, but that most likely won’t happen.