Guillermo del Toro Breaks His Silence On “The Rise And Fall Of Jabba The Hutt” ‘Star Wars’ Film He Didn’t Get To Complete: “Sometimes I’m Bitter, Sometimes I’m Not”

The force must have just missed Guillermo del Toro.

The director revealed that the now-defunct Star Wars film he was working on with filmmaker David S. Goyer would have focused on Jabba the Hutt, the alien crime lord that appeared in three of the franchise’s live-action films, as well as the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

Speaking to Collider’s Steven Weintraub at the outlet’s 10th anniversary screening of del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi action film Pacific Rim, del Toro explained how they “had the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt, so [he] was super happy.”

“We were doing a lot of stuff, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money, and then it’s one of those 30 screenplays that goes away,” he added. “Sometimes I’m bitter, sometimes I’m not. I always turn to my team and say, ‘Good practice, guys. Good practice. We designed a great world. We designed great stuff. We learned.'”

Del Toro maintained a positive attitude following the failed project, noting, “you can never be ungrateful with life.”

“Whatever life sends you, there’s something to be learned from it,” he continued. “So, you know, I trust the universe, I do. When something doesn’t happen, I go, ‘Why?’ I try to have a dialogue with myself. ‘Why didn’t it happen?’ And the more you swim upstream with the universe, the less you’re gonna realize where you’re going.”

asked @RealGDT how close he came to directing a #StarWars movie at @collider's 10th anniversary screening of #PacificRim in @IMAX 3D.

His first answer is pure del Toro. He then talks about what he took away from the experience. #theriseandfallofjabbathehut pic.twitter.com/470DAsFrXd

— Steven Weintraub (@colliderfrosty) October 7, 2023

According to Variety, Goyer was the one to break the news of the never-to-be-seen film while being interviewed on Josh Horowitz’s Happy, Sad, Confused podcast in September.

“I wrote an un-produced Star Wars movie that Guillermo del Toro was going to direct,” he revealed at the time. “That was about four years ago.”

Goyer said “there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on at Lucasfilm at the time,” which prevented the film from being greenlit, but he described the project as having “a cool script.”

“You have to ask [del Toro] about it,” he told Horowitz. “There is a lot of cool art work from it that was produced.”

Additionally, he shared that he had begun work on an “un-produced scriptment for an origins of the Jedi movie… that took place 25,000 years before the first Star Wars film.” Although Goyer is no longer working with Lucasfilm, a Jedi origin film is now being developed by director James Mangold, per Variety.

“Dabbling in Star Wars would have been fun for me,” Goyer said.