'Obi-Wan Kenobi Was Initially Planned As A Trilogy, Season One Is The First Movie.
In an interview with The Direct, Obi-Wan Kenobi writer Stuart Beattie opened up about the original plans for a project that would've led to a full trilogy of movies starring Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi character.
Though Beattie has a writer's credit for the first three episodes and the finale of the recently completed Disney Plus show, Beattie's original screenplay and story for Obi-Wan Kenobi got reworked quite a bit and was shifted from its movie format to TV . Beattie said he never collaborated with writer Joby Harold for the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.
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"I wrote the film that they based the show on. So, yeah. I spent like a year, year-and-a-half working on it," Beattie said to The Direct. "And then, when the decision was made not to make any more spin-off films after Solo came out, I left the project and went on to other things. Joby came on and took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six. So, I did not work with them at all, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff."
The release of Solo: A Star Wars Story was met with much trepidation by Star Wars fans after Disney changed directors in the middle of production and released the film on May 25, 2018, only five months after The Last Jedi's Dec. 15, 2017 release date. In the wake of mediocre box office results for a Star Wars movie, Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm claimed they were shifting the focus away from one-off Star Wars movies to focus on mainline movies and new trilogies, such as Beattie's Obi-Wan-focused trilogy. Reports of this shift came as soon as one month after the release of Solo, which earned $392.9 million worldwide. Currently, however, Taika Waititi is currently working on a one-off film that likely won’t start shooting until next year.
"So when I pitched my Obi-Wan story to Lucasfilm, I said, 'There's actually three stories here." Beattie told The Direct. "Because there's three different evolutions that the character has to make in order to go from Obi-Wan to Ben.' And the first one was the first movie, which was the show, which was, 'Surrender to the will of the Force. Transport your will, surrender your will. Leave the kid alone.' So then, the second [movie] was thinking about where Kenobi ends up. And one of the most powerful and probably the most powerful moment in all of Obi-Wan's story is that moment where he sacrifices himself in A New Hope. Great moment, you know, makes you cry. But, if you stop and think about it, it's a pretty sudden thing, to just kind of go be fighting a guy, to see Luke and go, 'I'm gonna die.' You know, that to me, that required forethought. That required pre-acceptance that this was going to happen.”
Though he never wrote the scripts for the second and third films of this trilogy, Beattie knew where the story was going.
"So again, it's one of those universal things we all struggle with, to come to terms with our own mortality. So, that was the second step of the evolution for me, that Obi-Wan now has to come to terms with his own mortality, somehow in a prophecy, or Qui-Gon telling him, 'There's going to come a moment where you're gonna have to sacrifice yourself for the good,' And then [Obi-Wan] is like, 'What? No, no, no, no, I'm here to help... I can't, no.' And get him to that point where Obi Wan has accepted the idea that he's going to die, and that he's going to die willingly at a crucial moment, and you will know when that moment presents itself. So that when that moment comes up in [A New Hope], you understand. He's recognizing he's been on this journey already, and he's waiting for this moment, and that's how he's able to make it so easily. To do this [sacrifice], and die. So that to me was the second evolution, the second film, the second story. So for me, if I have anything to do with the second season of Obi-Wan, that's the character evolution that I would take him on. That, to me, is really interesting. And like I said, universal."
Other projects that were rumoured to be in the works during the time of Solo's release included a story for Boba Fett and one for Lando. It's unclear if the pandemic further altered Lucasfilm's plans to focus on shows more than movies.
Fans have had mixed feelings about Obi-Wan Kenobi. Reports surfaced during the airing of the show that the show's ending had been changed from Beattie's original script. Beattie confirmed this by stating he originally planned for Reva to be killed off and that Reva wouldn't have known Darth Vader's identity, at least, not right away.
"Because I figured, 'How would she know that this thing in a mechanical suit that everyone calls Darth Vader is the guy who killed her, or tried to kill her?'" Beattie told The Direct. "So, it was Obi-Wan kind of letting her in on that secret and that revelation that makes her kind of go, 'Oh my god, I've been wrong this whole time.' And so she goes and basically saved Kenobi by sacrificing herself, telling Vader, 'I killed Kenobi.' And then Vader killed her, [with her] knowing that Vader would kill her. So, that kind of completed her arc. So just a little bit different that she was, yeah, absolutely, the Inquisitor hunting Kenobi all the way through and driven by her own personal demons."
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Sources: The Direct, Collider, Box Office Mojo