Star Wars: Underworld: McCallum Offers Insights on Scrapped Series

Posted in: Disney+, Star Wars, TV | Tagged: star wars

Star Wars: Underworld: McCallum Offers Insights on Scrapped Series

Producer Rick McCallum discusses what could have been with the proposed series Star Wars: Underworld before Disney purchased Lucasfilm.

Published Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:37:09 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• Rick McCallum says Star Wars: Underworld was a dark, sexy, violent pre-Disney series that would have reshaped canon.
• George Lucas and McCallum reportedly developed Star Wars: Underworld with top writers, including Ronald D. Moore.
• McCallum reveals Star Wars: Underworld stalled because each episode would have cost about $40 million to produce.
• An HBO deal for Star Wars: Underworld collapsed after executive turmoil, and Disney now owns the unused scripts.

Rick McCallum's relationship with George Lucas spans over 30 years, since working with him on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and has become a staple of his Lucasfilm empire, which includes his other pride and joy of a franchise in Star Wars. The two would collaborate when Lucas expanded the Skywalker Saga into the first three episodes, starting with The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005). While Lucas created a new generation of fans, the mixed reception from the franchise seems to have taken a creative toll on him, despite still having big plans, before ultimately selling his studio to Disney in 2012, where they've since taken over canon, forging a new path with different visionary directors. Even as they weren't spared from the wrath of audiences' changing attitudes to franchise fatigue, Disney is still developing its long-term franchise plans post-Skywalker Saga with new films and TV shows, some filling in the gaps with newer leads away from the original core. McCallum is now speaking about what those pre-Disney plans were, developing an ambitious TV series that would have broken Star Wars' traditional mold, which shifted Lucas's focus from a family-friendly franchise with "Underworld," with the producer speaking with the Young Indy Chroniclers about a darker, possibly more refreshing turn, even recruiting the likes of Ronald D. Moore to showrun the series.

Star Wars Producer Rick McCallum on His and George Lucas' Last Attempt to Pitch "Underworld" to HBO Before Disney's Eventual Acquisition

For discussion of what could have been on Star Wars: Underworld, you can skip to the 3-hour, 17-minute mark. "The most wonderful writers in the world on it. We created exactly the same experience for everybody at the [Skywalker] Ranch, again, phenomenal group of talent. These were dark. These were not…they were sexy. They were violent. They were just absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging," McCallum said, adding they closely worked with Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica writer Ronald D. Moore to potentially showrun since McCallum and Lucas were busy with other projects. "I mean, it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe, and Disney definitely would have never offered George to buy the…but no. They were…I mean, it's one of the great disappointments of our life, 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."

Citing HBO's ambitious plans from executive Chris Albert, like spending $12-13 million on the war drama series Band of Brothers, McCallum thought it would be a viable partner to fund "Underworld" before a scandal took Albert down and new management's priorities killed any chance. "The night before [Albert] was coming to see us, and we waited for the fallout to happen, and went straight to the new people Warner Bros had put in at HBO, and they weren't going to do anything expensive anymore. They were going to do small films. They had no desire to meet with us, and there was no other place you could go to. Apple, Amazon, even Netflix wasn't around then."

As far as if fans would ever get a chance to see what "Underworld" would have looked like and if it could take ANY form in the Disney era, if not the original TV series format, "Disney owns those scripts, so they'll never be made. I mean, seriously, they're so well done, and they're so dark and complicated and would have turned the whole saga on its head. It would have allowed Disney to go off and make..instead of these cookie-cutter Star Wars films, they could have gone off in any direction and made the equivalent of what [Christopher] Nolan did with Batman." For more on McCallum discussing his career, you can check out the entire episode.

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