In the world of Star Wars, one of the biggest “what ifs?” is Star Wars Underworld. That was the name given to a television show George Lucas and a team at Lucasfilm worked on for years before ultimately scrapping it. We’ve always heard that there were dozens of scripts written for the show, which would’ve been set on Coruscant, showing a whole new side of a galaxy far, far, away, but little is known beyond that.
In a new interview though, Rick McCallum, who was George Lucas’ producer at the time, shared some new details about the long-lost (but never forgotten) project. One of the biggest is that McCallum actually tried to budget out what the show could cost and the lowest he ever got it to was $40 million per episode. Forty million times 60 episodes equals $2.4 billion. No wonder no one wanted to make it. But, it sounds great. Here’s McCallum thanks to the Young Indy Chronicles podcast.
“I think we had over 60 scripts. Third-draft scripts,” McCallum says in the above clip. “Again, the most wonderful writers in the world on it. And again, we created exactly the same experience for everybody at [Skywalker] Ranch, and again just a phenomenal group of talent.”
“And these were dark. They were sexy, they were violent, they were just absolutely wonderful. Wonderful, complicated, challenging. I mean, it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe and Disney definitely would have never offered George to buy it [laughs]. But it’s one of the great disappointments of our life. But the problem was each episode was bigger than the films, so the lowest I could get it down to with the technology that existed then was about 40 million an episode.”
Even in today’s world, probably 30 years after McCallum budgeted things out, $40 million an episode is still a lot. Most of the bigger shows that you can think of—Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, etc.—usually cost between $10 million and $20 million an episode. And that’s still considered very high. Some of the most expensive have happened recently, with Netflix rumored to have spent close to $30 million per episode on the new Stranger Things and Amazon reportedly spending almost $60 million each on Rings of Power. So for a big Star Wars show, $40 million is not out of the question today, but it was certainly out of the question then. (Also, The Mandalorian costs significantly less than that.)
For more on Star Wars Underworld, check out this piece we wrote a few years back. It shows test footage McCallum commissioned to help sell the show to TV networks. It didn’t work out, but it’s a cool bit of trivia and history, just like this.
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