Obi-Wan Kenobi Was Originally Going to Be a Movie Trilogy

Obi-Wan Kenobi recently finished its six-episode run on Disney+ and it gave Star Wars fans the much-awaited return of Ewan McGregor as the titular Jedi Master between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. However, as it turns out, it was originally supposed to be a movie trilogy before it became a six-part series.

In a recent interview with The Direct, Obi-Wan Kenobi writer Stuart Beattie laid down some behind-the-scenes details of the series. Despite being credited in four episodes, he wasn't actually directly involved in the writing of the series as he only wrote the original screenplay for the film that the series is based on. The box office performance of Solo led to the cancellation of the feature film version and being reconceived later on as a series.

"Right, so not at all, none. I wrote the film that they based the show on," Beattie said. "So, yeah. I spent like a year, year-and-a-half working on it. 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 [Harold] 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."

Beattie shared that his original story pitch to Lucasfilm for Obi-Wan Kenobi was going to be "three stories" (aka a "full trilogy") with the first one ending up becoming the story of the series.

"So when I pitched my Obi-Wan story to Lucasfilm, I said, 'There's actually three stories here," he said. "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.'"

Beattie went on to reveal that the second film would have explored the titular Jedi Master's journey that would lead to A New Hope since it will deal with him coming "to terms with his own mortality" in relation to his sacrifice in his battle against Darth Vader in the Death Star. He revealed as well that McGregor and Lucasfilm were on-board with his idea before the cancellation.

It would have been interesting to see what would have looked like if the story of Obi-Wan Kenobi was on the big screen. While the series managed to accomplish telling its story on that scale, a movie trilogy might have been more epic, especially for an iconic character like him, and they could accomplish what they couldn't do on the series in terms of the scale of the action sequences.

While it is unlikely that we won't see the character have his own solo adventure on the big screen anytime soon, a lot of fans are hoping that the series will have a second season that could potentially explore Beattie's idea that he had on the second film. Let's just wait and see whether Lucasfilm will yield the Force for another chapter with our favorite Jedi Master.

Also Read: Obi-Wan Kenobi Composer Explains the Lack of Imperial March in the Series

All episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi are streaming on Disney+.