Guillermo del Toro is a strange director because he’s almost as famous for the movies he didn’t make as he is for what he did make. He’s been attached to a Doctor Strange movie, a Thor movie, a Lord of the Rings movie, a Chronicles of Narnia movie, and countless other projects. But recently, we learned of a new franchise he could have dipped his toe in.
When filmmaker David S. Goyer appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he teased a Star Wars script he wrote for del Toro to direct. Del Toro responded on Twitter, teasing the movie was about “J” and “BB.” This wasn’t as cryptic as he thought though, because in 2015 he told Yahoo! Movies that he “would do the sort of Godfather saga that Jabba the Hutt had to go through to gain control.”
But this was just everyone’s best guess, as there wasn’t any confirmation from the man himself. Now, we finally have the official word. In conversation with Collider, de Toro revealed he was in fact working on a Jabba the Hutt movie. “We had the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt, so I was super happy,” he said. “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.”
With huge names like Guillermo del Toro and Jabba the Hutt involved, it’s hard not to imagine what could have been. Thankfully, we don’t really have to. Now we know the movie would have followed the rise and fall of Jabba, we can look directly to The Book of Boba Fett, the Disney+ series that followed Boba Fett taking over Jabba’s crime syndicate.
It’s likely that this is in fact what this movie would have tackled toward the end. After all, the fall of Jabba the person isn’t much of a mystery, we saw that up close and personal in Return of the Jedi. But the fall of his empire is far more mysterious — and far more Godfather — than the fall of the Hutt himself. Who knows, maybe the “BB” wasn’t alluding to the double B in Jabba, but in Boba.
The Book of Boba Fett is about as close to The Godfather as it gets (at least, that’s what fans hoped it would be), and since its existence in the “Mandoverse” was met with mixed reviews, it’s hard not to think about how del Toro would’ve handled the criminal underbelly of Tatooine. Would he have introduced a bunch of biohacked space teens? Incorporated Cad Bane? As del Toro said about the project, “You can never be ungrateful with life. Whatever life sends you, there's something to be learned from it.” Maybe what Star Wars fans can learn is to be grateful for the Boba story we got — but that won’t stop us from fantasizing about what could have been.
