Guillermo Del Toro Still Gets Bitter Over His Scrapped Jabba The Hutt Star Wars Movie
By my count, there have been approximately eight billion "Star Wars" movies announced or rumored over the last few years. The "Game of Thrones" guys were going to make a trilogy (until it got canceled). Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige was developing a "Star Wars" project (it never really got off the ground). "Wonder Woman" director Patty Jenkins was going to direct "Star Wars: Rogue Squadron" (that's been shelved too). Supposedly we still might get movies from Taika Waititi and Rian Johnson one day. And then there are the three movies announced at Star Wars Celebration this year, from directors James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.
Somewhere in that long list of names is beloved genre movie director Guillermo del Toro, who has collected three Oscars so far and won the hearts of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy fans all over the world. Del Toro was originally approached to direct "Star Wars: Episode VII," but turned the offer down because he was too busy. A few years later he revealed at Comic-Con that he had an idea for a "Godfather"-style gangster movie about the rise of Jabba the Hutt through the criminal underbelly of the "Star Wars" universe, joking that he loves Jabba "because it's the character that looks the most like me."
At the time, del Toro cautioned, "This is not real, this is me as a fat geek just geeking out and talking about it," reminding his gathered fans that "my IMDb page is made of headlines of a lot of stuff that I'll never do." (You might even say that his IMDb page is a mountain of madness.) But del Toro actually did almost end up making a Jabba the Hutt movie, before it too joined the IMDb graveyard.
'Sometimes I'm bitter, sometimes I'm not'
Speaking at a recent Q&A hosted by Collider, del Toro indicated that the story would have been similar to the "rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt" idea he floated at Comic-Con back in 2015. At this point in his career, del Toro is enough of a veteran not to get too hung up over every project that goes nowhere, and he explained how he tries to still take away something of value from the experience:
"We were doing a lot of stuff, and then it's not my property, it's not my money, and then it's one of those 30 screenplays that goes away. Sometimes I'm bitter, sometimes I'm not. I always turn to my team and say, 'Good practice, guys. Good practice. We designed a great world. We designed great stuff. We learned.' You can never be ungrateful with life. Whatever life sends you, there's something to be learned from it. So, you know, I trust the universe, I do. When something doesn't happen, I go, 'Why?' I try to have a dialogue with myself. 'Why didn't it happen?' And the more you swim upstream with the universe, the less you're gonna realize where you're going."
(According to screenwriter David S. Goyer, who wrote the script for the Jabba movie that del Toro would have directed, the project fell apart because "there was just a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time.")
The pile of unproduced Guillermo del Toro movies and the pile of unproduced "Star Wars" movies are two expanding circles of a Venn diagram that were bound to overlap eventually. But even if we never got to see his take on Jabba the Hutt, at least we got to meet some other members of the Hutt crime family in "The Book of Boba Fett."