Before Obi-Wan Kenobi became a television series, it was conceived as a trilogy of films., according to the original screenwriter of the project. Obi-Wan Kenobi has recently concluded his six-episode series, in which Ewan McGregor has returned to play the Jedi Master.
The series was a huge success for Disney+, having the biggest premiere of any series on the streaming platform. But Obi-Wan Kenobi was originally going to be a feature film. In 2017, Stephen Daldry was going to direct Obi-Wan Kenobi as a movie and screenwriter Hossein Amini was going to write the script.
This was just one of many planned spinoffs based on popular Star Wars characters, such as a planned James Mangold Boba Fett movie and the then-unreleased Solo: A Star Wars Story. However, following Solo’s disappointing box office results, Lucasfilm changed its plans and returned both Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi to streaming series.
In an exclusive interview with TheDirect, screenwriter Stuart Beattie revealed that the original plan was for Obi-Wan Kenobi to be a trilogy of films.. Beattie reveals that he first pitched Obi-Wan Kenobi in 2016, a whole year before Daldry and Amini were announced on the project and that he wrote a full script for the Obi-Wan Kenobi feature film, and because the series was based on his script, he received a writing credit on episodes 1, 2, 3, and 6 of the series even though he had no direct involvement in the series.
Beattie reveals that he proposed to Lucasfilm three stories that were intended to be a trilogyin which it was traced how Obi Wan would become his character in ‘A New Hope’ and it was explained how and why he was willing to sacrifice himself on the ‘Death Star’.
The news of a trilogy of films derived from Obi-Wan Kenobi it’s an interesting look at how Lucasfilm intended to expand the Star Wars brand beyond the Skywalker Saga. If Obi-Wan Kenobi had been released as a movie, this or the planned Boba Fett movie would likely have been intended to be released in 2020 after the release of ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’, before the pandemic had altered those. plans.
An Obi-Wan Kenobi trilogy would likely have had an installment released every two years, with the intervening years seeing another Star Wars movie, be it other spinoffs or Rian Johnson’s planned Star Wars trilogy.