The Scrapped STAR WARS Movie From the GAME OF THRONES Creators Was About "The First Jedi"
Several years ago, right before HBO’s Game of Thrones series came to an end, series showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were hired by Lucasfilm to develop a number of Star Wars movies. It was rumored at the time that those films would have been set in in the era of the Old Republic.
It was shared at the time that the story would’ve been set “hundreds of years prior to the Skywalkers, so think almost Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings.”
Now, Benioff and Weiss have actually shared some details on their Star Wars project, which was ultimately scrapped, and it would’ve revolved around the story of the first Jedi. During an interview with THR, Benioff said:
“We wanted to do The First Jedi. Basically how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber …”
Weiss added:
“And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson, the duo’s longtime friend and 3BP producer] called his movie The Last Jedi. He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.”
When asked what went wrong, and why the project fell apart, he added:
“[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.”
The first Jedi was Prime Jedi, who became the first Jedi to ever use the Force. The Prime Jedi was also the founder of the Jedi Order. The Prime Jedi established the Order on the planet Ahch-To, around 25,025 BBY. The first Jedi Temple, which was located on Ahch-To, contained a mosaic of the Prime Jedi in a state of meditation and balance.
There’s an interesting story to tell there with the first Jedi, and that’s a story that might ultimately be explored in director James Mangold’s film, Dawn of the Jedi. That story is said to take place 25,000 years before the events of the original trilogy, and it will focus on the birth of The Force.
When previously talking about his project, Mangold described it as a Ben-Hur or The 10 Commandments film about The Force:
“It’s a chance to tell the entire story of its own, the birth of the force. When I first talked to Kathy Kennedy about it, I just said, ‘I just see this opening to make kind of a Ben-Hur or The 10 Commandments about the birth of the Force.’ The Force has become a kind of religious legend that spans through all these movies. But where did it come from? How is it found? Who found it? Who was the first Jedi? And that’s what I’m writing right now.”
In another interview, when talking about how the movie would center on the discovery of The Force, the director said:
"It just came from me thinking about if I were doing one, it seemed to me that most of what they were thinking about doing with movies were either in the present of Star Wars or the future, and what attracted me most was the distant past and how this galaxy formed and how, more specifically, the Force was discovered."
What we do know about the early history of The Force was that in “36,453 BBY, philosophers and scientists from several Star systems gathered on Tython to share mystical knowledge. The Force was ‘discovered.’ Unfortunately, in 25,793 BBY, several Tythan scholars began using their knowledge of the Force to pursue power, leading to the beginning of the Force Wars. Peace-minded monks that survived the destruction on Tython established the Jedi Order in 25,783 BBY.”