So Why Was The Search For Ben Solo Really Cancelled?

Over the course of his tenure in positions of power at Disney, Bob Iger has shown himself to have a chronic lack of taste. It was his call that forced Twin Peaks to reveal Laura Palmer's murderer prematurely, it was his call that cancelled a live-action remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (not that I want to see that but he said the reason why was that the original movie was not good), he was the one who forced Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm to prioritize Disney+ shows which diluted both the Star Wars and Marvel brands.

When news broke last week that Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver had developed and pitched an entire Star Wars movie set after The Rise of Skywalker about the return of Ben Solo, the follow-up that this movie was greenlit by Lucasfilm and then shot down by Iger didn't exactly strike me as weird because the man is clearly allergic to good ideas. Soderbergh knows how to make a good movie on a budget and letting a director like that work on a franchise like Star Wars will bring a level of prestige similar to Tony Gilroy working on Andor.

What did strike me as weird, however, was the rationale given. The explained reason why this film could not work in any capacity is that Ben Solo died, and there was no way to bring him back. Now, considering the fact that Ben died in a movie that features the quote "Somehow Palpatine returned" as the only explanation as to where the overarching bad guy came from after being canonically dead for forty years, that movie also featured the fake-out death of Chewbacca and the resurrection of Rey who literally died, and one of the main flagship Disney+ shows follows a character who was saved from death via literal time travel, this felt like a flimsy excuse.

There's definitely more at play here, and I believe it comes down to Disney spending the majority of the last year or so trying to play both sides against the middle politically. We saw the obviously planted story that was complete nonsense about how Rachel Zegler was solely responsible for the failings of Snow White, the reporting that Elio was changed mid-development to remove any queer allusions, and the reporting that Disney was using focus groups of fans to try and cater their releases to those fanbases, misunderstanding online culture wars and general vitriol for fandom.

In the waning days of the sequel trilogy (late 2019), Lucasfilm had two major live-action Star Wars releases. Disney+ launched with The Mandalorian as its flagship title, and The Rise of Skywalker was going to culminate the Skywalker Saga theatrically. Among the far right, people who had christened themselves the true fans, The Rise of Skywalker was derided while The Mandalorian was acclaimed to a borderline ridiculous degree. They also launched a campaign to cast aside anyone who supported the sequels as shippers who only cared about the romance angle, specifically a relationship between Rey and Ben Solo.

Taken into the full context of the last few years, I believe that this is probably closer to the reason this film was vetoed by Disney. The side of YouTube and podcasts that talk about entertainment is flooded with people on the far right who do an excellent job of manufacturing a controversy. If they began production on a sequel trilogy follow-up about Ben, the negative press about the movie would be invented before a script was ever turned in. Why tempt that when you can make a movie sequel to The Mandalorian and bring Ryan Gosling in to be the lead in a standalone film?

Here's the thing Disney has to remember: this group is fickle and is not representative of actual fans. This group you're trying to appease opposed the acquisition of Lucasfilm in the first place, all the casting of the sequels before a frame of the movie was even shot, derided The Force Awakens for being too derivative, derided The Last Jedi for being too different, and only liked The Mandalorian until women started gaining larger roles. It is absurd to think this is a group you should work to appease. Arguably, what you should do as a studio is shut them down and publicly say, "No, this outlet is lying." Until Disney and Lucasfilm do that, they can make the whitest and most inoffensive movies possible and still never win this group over because if they so much as step a toe over the line, they'll be back in front of the metaphorical firing squad.