Star Wars: Underworld – New Details On George Lucas' Canceled TV Series Revealed By Producer

These days, the idea of a Star Wars TV series is old news. In lieu of any big-screen outings for the franchise since the widely panned "Rise of Skywalker" in 2019, the last five-plus years of Star Wars have consisted entirely of streaming shows on Disney+, books, comics, and video games. But back before George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and its associated properties to Disney, Star Wars was a film series before all else, and the idea of bringing its universe to television in live-action seemed far-fetched. Even still, it nearly happened under Lucas, and we now know just how far those grand plans went.

The series' working title was "Star Wars: Underworld," and it would have looked at all kinds of less-traveled corners of the galaxy, following smugglers, bounty hunters, the general criminal element, and other stories less central to the saga of the Skywalkers and the Jedi. And according to longtime Lucas collaborator and Star Wars prequel trilogy producer Rick McCallum, a ton of work had been done by the time the series was ultimately canned.

"There was a period when people thought we weren't doing anything," McCallum said on a recent episode of the Young Indy Chroniclers podcast. Quite the contrary: The series was in development for five years, and that time included a massive amount of writing. "I think we had over 60 scripts, third-draft scripts," McCallum said, with "the most wonderful writers in the world on it." So what ultimately got in the way of production? Those fantastic scripts came with an absurdly hefty price tag: $40 million per episode.

To hear Rick McCallum tell it, "Star Wars: Underworld" would have been a huge shift in tone for the franchise — a high-caliber, prestige-tier TV series that dealt with all kinds of complicated ideas. The knowledge that 60 scripts (presumably multiple seasons) had been written and revised means that there's a whole other Star Wars saga out there somewhere.

"Phenomenal group of talent," McCallum said during his appearance on Young Indy Chroniclers. (McCallum also produced "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" for Lucas.) "And these were dark. These were not, you know, 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 to George to buy this."

If that sounds ambitious, it clearly was. While McCallum called the series falling apart "one of the great disappointments of our lives," he admitted that it was too grand of a pitch to feasibly make for TV at the time. "The problem was, each episode was bigger than the films," the producer said. "The lowest I could get it down to, with the technology that existed then, was about $40 million an episode."

Speaking of technology, Lucas wanted to push the envelope even further than he had with the Star Wars prequel trilogy. "Battlestar Galactica" showrunner Ron Moore, who was also a member of the writing squad who worked on "Star Wars: Underworld," once said that Lucas "wanted to do a lot of cutting edge technological stuff with CG and virtual sets and so on," and this was long before The Volume existed, so it boggles the mind to think about what might have been developed around that time if everything had worked out.

Back then, HBO was the definitive name in big-budget television, so McCallum and Lucas went there to discuss the idea. There was real movement on the project, and they started looking for a European partner for co-production. Unfortunately, shakeups at HBO led to the talks being dropped, and there was no other real option at the time for a production of that magnitude.

It's easy to hear Rick McCallum discuss the dark, sexy, heavy themes and unconventional narrative ideas of "Star Wars: Underworld" and think of "Andor." The rebel spy thriller saga has been Disney's biggest critical hit in the franchise's streaming era, and a lot of the praise it's received is due to exactly that kind of mature tone. It recently came out that "Andor" cost a total of $645 million for its two seasons. That may sound whopping, but with 24 episodes in all, that still only comes out to just under $27 million per episode — a far cry from the proposed budget of "Underworld." (If McCallum's numbers were right, 60 episode of "Underworld" would have cost $2.4 billion.)

It's also worth remembering that when "Underworld" was being worked on, the reputation of the Star Wars prequels was still pretty poor. Nostalgia and Disney's committee approach to franchising hadn't yet turned public sentiment toward those films positive, and Lucas himself was still a pretty polarizing figure.

Lucas did venture into the realm of Star Wars TV before selling to Disney with the animated series "The Clone Wars," which led to similar shows under the franchise's new management like "Star Wars Rebels" and "The Bad Batch." But neither that legacy nor the greatness of "Andor" is quite the same as whatever Lucas' full, unadulterated live-action vision might have been.