The Alphabet will take a look at the long-gestating project now that the Lucasfilm acquisition by Disney is complete.
- Jan 11, 2013
AceShowbiz - "Star Wars" will not only return on the big screen, but may also get a new small-screen adaption. ABC entertainment president Paul Lee says the network will start a discussion about "Star Wars" live-action TV series with Lucasfilm, now that the studio acquisition by Disney is complete.
"We'd love to do something with Lucasfilm, we're not sure what yet," Lee tells Entertainment Weekly. "We haven't even sat down with them. We're going to look at [the live-action series], we're going to look at all of them, and see what's right. We weren't able to discuss this with them until [the acquisition] closed and it just closed. It's definitely going to be part of the conversation."
The "Star Wars" live-action series was commissioned by longtime Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum. "Battlestar Galactica" writer Ron Moore was tapped to pen the scripts, which McCallum once called the most "provocative, bold and daring material that we've ever done." The project, however, has been put on the shelf for the past few years, mainly due to budget issue.
The financial problem could be solved with Disney now owning Lucasfilm, but there's another potential concern. As EW points out, "cautious brand managers are sometimes reluctant to have a live-action TV show on the air when producing live-action films," in this case the already-announced new "Star Wars" trilogy.
"It's going to be very much up to the Lucasfilm brands how they want to play it," Lee says about whether the project is still viable or not. "We got to a point here with Marvel, a very special point, where we're in the Marvel universe, and very relevantly so, but we're not doing 'The Avengers'. But 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' is part of 'The Avengers'. So maybe something oblique is the way to [approach the Star Wars universe] rather than going straight head-on at it," he shares a possible solution.
Sources say the story for the potential live-action series is set between the original "Star Wars" film trilogy and the prequels. It centers on "rival families struggling over the control of the seedy underside of the Star Wars universe and the people who live within the subterranean level and air shafts of the metropolis planet Coruscant (the Empire's urban-sprawl-covered home planet)," with a bounty hunter possibly as the main character.
Words are, the plotline and the designs for the TV project were used to help make upcoming Star Wars videogame "1313".
A "Star Wars" animated series, "Star Wars: The Clone Wars", is currently airing on Cartoon Network.
