The Hunt For Ben Solo fan campaign is still going, and its latest stunt saw a truck circle the Mandalorian and Grogu premiere in Hollywood.
The Star Wars superfans behind the campaign have spent a year now trying to convince Disney to make canceled movie The Hunt For Ben Solo a reality, putting money into various initiatives designed to keep Adam Driver’s character front of mind.
Late last year, Driver dropped a bombshell to the Associated Press that he’d spent the last few years developing The Hunt for Ben Solo. The Lucasfilm-approved but Bob Iger-nixed direct follow-up to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was confirmed by attached director Steven Soderbergh, and on multiple occasions the fanbase has hired planes to do fly-overs of the Walt Disney Studio lot in Burbank to rally support — something Rey Skywalker actress Daisy Ridley has responded positively to.
The movie would have taken place following The Rise of Skywalker and centered on Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren and his quest for redemption. Driver told the Associated Press that The Hunt For Ben Solo was “one of the coolest f—king scripts I had ever been a part of.”
Driver played Ben Solo / Kylo Ren in each of the three films in Lucasfilm’s Sequel Trilogy, with his final appearance in 2019’s divisive The Rise of Skywalker. “I always was interested in doing another Star Wars,” Driver said. He revealed he had been in talks about another Star Wars movie since 2021, and that then Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy had “reached out.”
“I always said: with a great director and a great story, I’d be there in a second,” Driver commented. “I loved that character and loved playing him.”
Driver said Lucasfilm “loved the idea” and “totally understood our angle and why we were doing it.” However, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney co-chairman Alan Bergman said no. “They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that,” he said. Soderbergh told AP: “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.”
Driver was described as feeling mystified by the decision, insisting the plan was to “be judicial about how to spend money and be economical with it, and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven.” He pointed to the much-loved Empire Strikes Back as being “the standard of what those movies were.”
The Hunt For Ben Solo sounds dead, but Brianna Johns, writer, voice actor, and self-confessed “avid” Star Wars fan, has not given up hope. Johns, alongside other members of the campaign, arranged for a mobile billboard truck to circle the world premiere of The Mandalorian and Grogu in Hollywood, CA. The truck featured large black text on both sides that said “WHERE’S BEN SOLO?” while showcasing the campaign’s calling card, Ben’s Missing Poster, on the back.
“This truck is our way of showing Disney we’re still here,” Johns told IGN. “We saw someone from Industrial Light & Magic posted our truck to their Instagram story and are taking that as a good sign, trusting that word of mouth spread within the event.”
The aim, Johns said, is for the fan campaign to hold one major event at least every other month “to inspire fans and engage the C-Suite.” In January, it was billboards, in March there was a presence at Toronto Comicon. They even had a professional skydiver jump out of a plane, and held a ticketed special screening of The Last Jedi in April. Now, it’s the premiere truck.
“Count on more meetups, more efforts and ways to help online and off,” Johns continued. “We’ll keep showing up and making noise however we can. Our overall goal is the same as it ever was: We want Ben Solo’s return on the big screen.”
Last year, Daisy Ridley told IGN she’d heard “rumblings” of Adam Driver’s revelations about the movie. “I have lots of friends who are crew, so things always travel like that. But, whoa! When the story came out, no, I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ And it was him that said it, right?” Ridley added that she found the fan campaign that sprung up following the news heart-warming.
“I do love when there is a collective of positivity,” she said. “The way the internet seems to have rallied to try and get it to happen. I think one), it’s fantastic for us all. It’s good for us to all be united about something in a really positive way. Obviously, everyone knows he was a very popular character, but it was also lovely to think, ‘Wow, people really, really care and want this.’ I just… I like it. I like when people join forces — excuse the pun — from all around the world, all different sorts of people. I just love that the Star Wars fandom is such a huge and gorgeous array of different points of view and different people, and the fact that everyone is really behind this thing, I think, is just sort of lovely, in a time that is so f***ing nuts for probably every single person on this Earth. I think it’s wonderful. So I was surprised, and honestly, I felt joyful about how it went down.”
In the short term, Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian & Grogu movie is out imminently, then Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter releases May 2027. TV wise, Ahsoka Season 2 is in development. Ridley’s Rey film, assuming it actually gets made, takes place roughly 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker as she looks to rebuild the Jedi Order.
Image credit: Brianna Johns | @bananajohns.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
