TIL George Lucas had over 50 scripts ready for a live-action Star Wars show that never got made. It was called Star Wars: Underworld, and it was supposed to dive deep into the criminal side of the galaxy—the dirty streets of Coruscant, crime syndicates, political corruption, all of it.
Lucas and his team spent years developing the project, and from everything we’ve learned since, Underworld could’ve completely changed how we see Star Wars on screen.
But in the end, the project was scrapped before it ever made it to production. So, here are 5 lesser-known facts about George Lucas’s ambitious Star Wars series that never saw the light of day.
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1. Extensive Script Development
George Lucas wasn’t just floating ideas—he and his team were serious about Star Wars: Underworld. They reportedly wrote over 50 full scripts, with the vision to eventually produce 100 episodes with a potential of up to 400. These weren’t filler episodes either.
The stories dug deep into the darker, grittier side of the Star Wars universe, exploring everything from organized crime and political corruption to love, betrayal, and moral ambiguity—all set against the backdrop of Coruscant’s seedy underworld.
2. High Production Costs
One of the biggest reasons Star Wars: Underworld never made it to production was simple: it was way too expensive to make.
George Lucas envisioned the show with cinematic-level quality, which came with a massive price tag.
According to reports, each episode would have cost around $5–10 million at the time, but to get the exact level of visual effects Lucas wanted, estimates ballooned up to $40 million per episode—making the total cost for 100 episodes well over $2 billion.
To put that into perspective, Game of Thrones—one of the most expensive shows of its time—cost around $6 million per episode in its earlier seasons, and peaked at about $15 million per episode in its final season. Even The Mandalorian, which debuted years later using cutting-edge virtual production, reportedly costs about $15 million per episode.
Compared to those, Underworld would have been the most expensive television show ever made by a wide margin. It simply wasn’t feasible at the time—even for Star Wars.
George Lucas had the scripts, the vision, and the team. But the cost of bringing his ambitious ideas to life—at a quality matching the films—was just too high. As Lucas himself put it:
“Obviously, when we do figure this problem out, it will dramatically effect features, because feature films are costing between $250 to $350 million. When we figure this out, they will be able to make a feature film for $50 million.”
Lucas wasn’t just thinking about Underworld—he was trying to change how movies and television could be made altogether. But until that production breakthrough became possible, the project had to be shelved.
And with the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney shortly after, Star Wars: Underworld faded into the vaults—a massive, ambitious project that just didn’t arrive at the right time.
3. A Star Wars Series About Crime on Coruscant
What made Star Wars: Underworld so unique was its setting—it wasn’t about galactic battles or Jedi vs. Sith. The show was going to take us into the dark, lower levels of Coruscant, the capital of the galaxy, where crime syndicates, political corruption, and back-alley deals ruled. It would have shown a completely different side of Star Wars—grittier, more grounded, and full of morally complex characters.
George Lucas described the tone of the series himself:
“It’s kind of like Episode IV — it’s funny and there’s action, but it’s [a] lot more talky. It’s more of what I would call a soap opera with a bunch of personal dramas in it. It’s not really based on action-adventure films from the ’30s — it’s actually more based on film noir movies from the ’40s!”
This grounded, noir-style approach would’ve been a major shift from the space fantasy tone we’re used to—and possibly the most adult Star Wars content ever attempted at the time.
4. Underworld Was So Bold, It Might’ve Prevented the Disney Deal
Now here’s something that really blew my mind. Star Wars: Underworld wasn’t just ambitious—it was so bold and mature, it could’ve completely changed the direction of the franchise. These scripts weren’t like anything we’ve seen in Star Wars before. They were gritty, political, violent—even sexy.
Rick McCallum, who worked closely with George Lucas, said it best:
“These were dark [scripts]. They were sexy. They were violent… it would’ve blown up the whole ‘Star Wars’ universe and Disney would’ve definitely never offered George to buy the franchise.”
Just imagine—if Underworld had actually been made, the version of Star Wars we know today might not even exist. No Disney buyout, no sequel trilogy, maybe no Mandalorian or Ahsoka series. That’s how radically different this show would’ve been.
McCallum even said the project’s cancellation was “one of the great disappointments of our lives.” So yeah, they were serious about this thing. It wasn’t just a side idea—it was something that could’ve redefined the entire galaxy.
We’ll never know what could’ve happened if Underworld got made… but one thing’s clear: it would’ve changed Star Wars forever.
5. Technological Limitations Held the Project Back
Even with George Lucas funding development and writing more than 50 scripts, there was still one huge roadblock: the technology just wasn’t ready. Lucas wanted Star Wars: Underworld to look as good as the movies but with a much smaller budget for a TV show. That meant they needed new, affordable tech that simply didn’t exist yet.
Lucas himself explained the situation clearly:
“It sits on the shelf. We have 50 hours. We are trying to figure out a different way of making movies. We are looking for a different technology that we can use, that will make it economically feasible to shoot the show.”
As producer Rick McCallum explained in an interview:
“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.”
They tried to find workarounds, exploring digital backlot filming and other cost-saving strategies, but nothing matched the scale and ambition Lucas had in mind. It wasn’t until years later, with new advances like the StageCraft volume used in The Mandalorian, that this kind of visual storytelling became more feasible for TV.