Good news, Star Wars fans, the live-action TV series might be back on! Or maybe bad news, since we’ve been both looking forward to and dreading every development since Disney acquired Star Wars from George Lucas. The point is, ABC has been talking to Lucasfilm about giving it another shot, so hooray and/or boo!
At an event at the Television Critics Association press tour on Sunday, ABC president Paul Lee responded to a question by IGN’s Eric Goldman about the possibility of a Star Wars TV series, and he said he’s been talking to Lucasfilm about it. Lee said:
I certainly have a glint in my eye. They have a lot on their plate when you look at the features that they’re planning on rolling out for the next few years, but we’ve started conversations with them.
Before selling Lucasfilm to Disney for four billion dollars, George Lucas and Rick McCallum had spent several years working on a live-action series set in the time between the prequels and original trilogy. Lucas said in 2011 that they had fifty hours worth of scripts for the tentatively-titled Star War: Underworld piled up unproduced due to the impossibility of making the show on a TV budget.
Disney may abandon that project instead of salvaging it, as the upcoming CGI animated series Star Wars Rebels will take place in that same time period, and Lucas’s ideas may conflict with it as well as the new movies.
To date, the only [Edit: live-action] Star Wars projects that have made it to TV are the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special and two Ewok made-for-TV movies. Still, Game Of Thrones shows that investing a film-like budget on a property that deserves it can deliver success.
[Edit: We failed to specify that we meant live-action Star Wars projects coming to television in the last paragraph. It’s been updated, and now all is right with the world.]
- Patton Oswalt’s Episode VII pitch combines Marvel and Star Wars on ABC… and now it’s animated
- Jedi parkour is cheap enough for these guys, so why can’t ABC pull it off?
- John Williams will serenade your through the new trilogy with an awesome soundtrack
