George Lucas Almost Blew Up 'Star Wars' With a Crazy Expensive TV Series

A lot of digital ink was spilled over the massive cost of The Acolyte, with smug haters blasting the show for its huge budget and supposedly tarnishing George Lucas’ legacy because the toxic fandom still can’t handle seeing female characters, particularly in the form of lesbian space witches.

Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that not only would the Flannel One have delivered the most ridiculously expensive show in TV history, but it would have gotten sex all over your Star Wars. Punch it, Chewie!

As dorks like me know, Lucas became obsessed with making a live-action series called Star Wars: Underworld after wrapping up The Prequel Trilogy. There were talks of airing it on ABC, and for a while, it seemed very close to reality — until it didn’t. Lucas famously sold Star Wars to Disney and walked into the sunset with $4 billion. (OK, he may have looped back and called Disney “white slavers” before coming to peace with selling his baby.) What happened to Underworld? According to Lucas’ longtime producer Rick McCallum, the show was so expensive and “sexy,” that it would’ve cratered the whole franchise.

Via Variety:

“I think we had over 60 scripts… like third draft scripts,” McCallum said, noting they brought the “most wonderful writers in the world” to Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch to map out and pen the series. “These were dark [scripts]. They were sexy. They were violent. They were absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging scripts.”

McCallum stopped short of providing plot details for “Star Wars: Underworld” but said the series “would’ve blown up the whole ‘Star Wars’ universe and Disney would’ve definitely never offered George to buy the franchise.”

The producer said not making “Underworld” remains “one of the great disappointments of our lives,” adding: “The problem was that each episode was bigger than the films, so the lowest I could get it down to with the tech that existed then was $40 million an episode.”

Just for some perspective, $20 million per episode still seems astronomical today in the year 2025 even though that’s what HBO has been dropping on House of the Dragon. There’s a reason why people balked at the cost of The Acolyte. So, $40 million per episode back in the early 2010s would’ve been freaking insane. Ol’ George would’ve been out of his goddamn mind, but I can’t help but wonder if, maybe, that’s how Star Wars should’ve ended?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Andor is a masterpiece, and I’m not one of the people who hated The Sequel Trilogy. (Two-thirds of it anyway.) That said, if anyone should’ve plowed the franchise into the wall leaving a $2.4 billion fireball behind, it should’ve been Lucas. Instead, Star Wars is letting out a dull whimper as Disney scrambles to punt Baby Yoda in theaters and bet on Ryan Gosling turning things around.

Let this be a lesson: Never sell your children. You may think it’s a great idea, and Christ, do they eat a lot, but don’t do it. (I feel like I made a difference here today. This was a good talk.)