This Proposed New Star Wars Trilogy Is a Reminder That Hollywood Needs Fresh Voices

"Mankind has colonized many worlds in a time when travel faster than the speed of light has been made possible by the harvesting of exotic matter from the eggs of the largest species mankind has ever seen. Those that take part in the hunt for the matter are mostly involuntary labor."

Last fall, it was reported that powerhouse writer/producer/director Simon Kinberg was to oversee a new Star Wars trilogy at Lucasfilm, which may not encompass Chapters 10-12 of the Skywalker Saga (the nascent films are very much in creative flux right now) but are believed to be based around the continuing story of Daisy Ridley's Rey Skywalker. It is unknown if these are related to the Jedi Academy film that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is still set to direct starring Ridley, and from which screenwriter Steven Knight recently departed.

The expanded involvement of Kinberg in the Star Wars universe has been criticized by some fans, considering the disastrous results of his last two directing outings: 2019's Dark Phoenix and 2022's The 355. Yet Kinberg has been involved with Kathleen Kennedy's Lucasfilm since 2012, co-creating Star Wars Rebels, penning an unmade Boba Fett movie, and advising on The Force Awakens and Rogue One. He is considered in the industry to be a reliable, studio-friendly craftsman who can execute notes and works well with talent. He may be a status quo choice to lead creative on the next phase of the galaxy far, far away, but Kinberg has also shepherded some terrific original sci-fi to the screen including Neill Blomkamp's Elysium and Ridley Scott's The Martian. Then there's the big fish that got away…

On March 16, 2015, director Ruairí Robinson posted to the web his 3-minute proof-of-concept film “The Leviathan,” about a future where man hunts giant sky whales in order to harvest them for exotic matter that enables lightspeed travel via an Alcubierre drive. While the key Herman Melville elements of an obsessed captain and an even larger granddaddy space whale would be present in the proposed feature, the focus would be the exploited crewmen on the ground. The short amassed millions of views and hype posts on movie sites around the globe. Eleven days later, on March 27, it was announced that the X-Men franchise's Simon Kinberg had signed to produce a feature version of “The Leviathan” alongside Blomkamp. Then… nothing happened. Despite having the support of powerful producers alongside a script by Jim Uhls of Fight Club fame, “The Leviathan” is one great white whale that hasn't been harpooned by movie cameras.

“I get a lot of people asking, ‘What’s happening with Leviathan more than any other thing I’ve done,” Robinson told us in late 2023.

We're going to look at how “The Leviathan” came to be, then not be, as well as how Kinberg's involvement in Star Wars may or may not have conflicted with Robinson's movie. More than anything, this is a story of how hard it is – even with every advantage of extremely qualified creatives – to summon unique large-canvas stories to the screen when we need them the most.

Filmmaker on the Rise

After the success of his early short films “The Silent City” (starring future Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy) and the Oscar-nominated “Fifty Percent Grey,” Ruairí Robinson became something of a hot commodity. Around 2008, the then-30-year-old Irish filmmaker became attached to helm the live-action Akira, a big-budget Warner Bros. project eyeing actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tetsuo (“Travis”) and a pre-MCU Chris Evans as Kaneda. Robinson ultimately dropped out of the still-unmade Akira, which has over the years enlisted a musical chairs assembly of filmmakers including Taika Waititi, The Hughes Brothers, and Jaume Collet-Serra. After two years fruitlessly spent on that studio experience, he conceived of “The Leviathan” almost flippantly.

Said Robinson, “I came up with the idea of doing ‘Moby Dick in space’ in 2009 as kind of a joke about taking classic literature and setting it in space to ruin it. ‘Jane Eyre… in space!’ Went through a list of classic novels until I hit on Moby Dick and thought, ‘Actually, this could work.’”

He ultimately got a first feature under his belt with 2013's The Last Days on Mars, an indie sci-fi horror picture starring Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, and Olivia Williams that made little impact upon release, but showed he could work with good actors amid limited resources. It did him no favors career-wise, though, finding himself “in the position of fighting desperately to be seventh director in line to do some Hunger Games YA knockoff piece of shit sequel… I'm taking meetings and it was not really a positive feeling.”

Changing course, Robinson stopped taking meetings and devoted a year of 15-hour days to develop the visuals for “The Leviathan” alongside concept artist Jordu Schell (who designed the Na'vi for Avatar) and Jim Murray of 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics fame. He did this parallel to Jim Uhls penning the feature screenplay so they could have both tasks completed in that timeline, with films like The Wages of Fear and its remake Sorcerer as tonal influences. Robinson received 45,000 euros in government development funding from The Irish Film Board to put together his 3-minute pitch film for “The Leviathan,” money which had to be heavily augmented by the director doing much of his own animation/storyboards, including texturing, lighting, and rendering in After Effects.

He also employed skilled professionals working for lower rates. For example, video game character modeler Colin Thomas (The Last of Us) created the intricately detailed 3D model of the whale-creature for around two grand when a film-ready textured asset typically goes for $250,000 or more. Thomas also remodeled the costumes for free. Deadpool director Tim Miller allowed Robinson to use Blur Studios' render farm during downtime, crippling it several times. Industry giant WETA was hired for costume and vehicle design, including Adam Anderson (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) and Ben Mauro (Halo Infinite). Ryan Stafford, a visual effects producer on the Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes trilogy, loaned a $60,000 dollar Xsens motion capture suit to create the movement of the involuntary workers onboard the flying ship which hunts the whales.

Paydirt

The overall impression is that all these talents and companies were chipping in because they believed in the potential of the project, a feeling which multiplied once the 3-minute piece finally hit the web in March of 2015. Just a few days prior, Robinson's reps at WME shopped the project to studios, with Simon Kinberg expressing an immediate interest.

“I already know and like Simon Kinberg's work because I've read some of his scripts,” Robinson stated in 2016. “It's unusual to have a writer that's a producer. It makes me feel much more comfortable in the process that it's not some suit, it's someone who actually knows how to tell stories and is in a really powerful position in the industry right now, which is really good for me.”

Once the short dropped to the public – the Vimeo and YouTube uploads having amassed nearly 4.5 million combined views – it was only days before the package was picked up by 20th Century Fox under Kinberg's Genre Film umbrella, with additional financing from Nick Ryan, Robbie Ryan and Billy O’Brien of Floodland Pictures (The Summit). Work commenced on developing Uhls' script further, with plans to utilize many of Blomkamp's production personnel. All the stars seemed to be aligning for “The Leviathan.”

“I like everyone that was involved at Fox, especially Steve Asbell, so I’m sad I wasn’t able to make it there,” Robinson explained. “There isn’t really a big epic tale of woe here either. Disney bought Fox a few years back and Leviathan isn’t really a very Disney-friendly project.”

Indeed, one of Disney's first acts upon taking over Fox in 2019 was to cancel Wes Ball's ambitious adaptation of MouseGuard only two weeks before production. Many of the initial 2020-2021 Disney releases of 20th Century Fox titles under the new 20th Century Studios banner underwhelmed financially (including Kinberg-produced The New Mutants) due to the pandemic and, perhaps, because they were films of the old regime. Cut to 2024, and the shingle only theatrically released three movies (The First Omen, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Alien: Romulus), all based on legacy Fox franchises rather than originals. In a movie world increasingly inhospitable to new/untested concepts, will there ever be a place for “The Leviathan”?

“As of now I don’t have big exciting news to share,” Robinson admits. “I have the rights back and a script I really like. I was approached recently about doing an animated version but don’t think that’s gonna pan out. It’s an expensive movie so I’ve been focusing on developing stuff that's a bit more manageable scale.”

A Galaxy Far, Far Away

Then comes the awkward aspect of Kinberg's involvement. On February 10, 2016, the Disney+ animated show Star Wars Rebels premiered the fifteenth episode of Season 2 titled “The Call,” which featured the first-ever appearance of the Purrgil, flying space whale creatures who are connected to lightspeed travel. The series was produced and co-created by Simon Kinberg, who was also part of the initial Disney-era braintrust developing Star Wars story concepts starting in 2012. Nothing ever came of “The Leviathan,” but Purrgil continue to be a big part of the Star Wars universe, particularly in the 2023 show Ahsoka where they appeared in live-action for the first time, resembling the flying whales from Robinson's short in many, many respects.

“I haven’t seen Ahsoka,” admits Robinson. “But I saw that the writer of Solo acknowledged my short as being an inspiration for a scene in that movie.”

This refers to the giant tentacle creature Summa-Verminoth – partly inspired by the kraken in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – that shows its mug during the Kessel Run sequence of that 2018 bomb. Screenwriter Jon Kasdan name-dropped Robinson's film specifically during a now-deleted Twitter commentary (via /Film):

“One thing we stumbled across while working on this was a fantastic short film/teaser directed by Ruairí Robinson called The Leviathan. You can find it on YouTube and Vimeo. It has long-rumored to be turned into a feature and I sincerely hope it will be.”

“But honestly, space whales are a very old trope,” Robinson adds. “There’s even a section on space whales on TV Tropes showing examples going back to the 1970s at least, so it would be silly for me to claim this was some big innovation on my part.”

While there's still the weird parallel of Purrgil being specifically linked with lightspeed travel ala Leviathan, there were space whale-esque flying sea creature concepts designed for Star Wars by Ralph McQuarrie. These paintings date as far back as The Empire Strikes Back, though they went unused until they appeared as Aiwha (more of an underwater pterodactyl) in Attack of the Clones.

Here's the million-dollar question: Did Kinberg attach himself to Leviathan in order to appropriate Robinson's idea? Conversely, were Purrgil's already in the pipeline at Lucasfilm and he attached himself to kill any conflicts that might arise with Leviathan's teaser going public? Or is it all just parallel development from a producer who has his hand in a lot of pies? Thanks to Jon Kasdan, we know Robinson's short was at least on Lucasfilm's radar. This author even casually brought up “The Leviathan” to Kinberg off-camera after an interview for Dark Phoenix in 2019, and he seemed to have barely recalled the project. While Mr. Kinberg's reps did not respond to requests for this article, Robinson himself is adamant there's neither smoke nor fire to the idea that Purrgil sprang from Leviathan.

“I found out later that there had been other sci-fi adaptations of Moby Dick in various forms,” said Robinson. “The Deadline comments section will always let you know you are ripping off things you have never heard of before. There were other attempts at making versions of this story as a movie too. Apparently Lynn Ramsey was going to do a version at some point, and another sci-fi Moby Dick spec – weirdly also called Leviathan – sold while I was in the finishing stages of doing my short. I guess it’s just one of those ideas floating around in the ether, waiting to plucked from the air and brought into existence in a way that becomes iconic in people's minds.”

Looking Forward

Whether intentional or not, do the parallel space whales of the Star Wars franchise mean “The Leviathan” is no longer a fresh enough concept, even though it technically pre-dates Purrgil? It's also quite possible that – despite an incredible futuristic vision which millions sparked to in 2015 – Robinson's voice may be too distinctive for studios increasingly looking for sure things. Even a film as superficially transgressive as the R-rated smash Deadpool & Wolverine is, below the surface, as safe a movie as you could ever greenlight.

“The Leviathan” on the other hand has strong themes of exploited workers put in untenable situations against their will. That's a lot to swallow for increasingly AI-crazy/residual-resistant Hollywood studios that intentionally starved out unions for months on end during 2023's strikes, during which mining actors' and writers' work with AI without consent was a sticking point. Paperclip to that the screenwriter of the truly subversive Fight Club, a movie that would never get made in today's environment.

There is a ray of hope, though. Traces of the tone and visuals of “The Leviathan” can be found in a 2024 short Robinson co-wrote and directed titled “Ice,” the first of six web films under the series A Thousand Suns funded by BlackMilk Studio. The rugged yellow suits, industrial spaceships, and lousy weather are all there, though the space whale is swapped for a Cthulhu-type creature on an ice planet. Lensed in Iceland, it's a more well-funded realization of Robinson's earlier project… and further proof that he deserves another shot at a feature. It has amassed 2.6 million views to date.

Then in the sixth episode of A Thousand Suns, titled “Tomorrow Land,” the filmmaker was able to get some pyrrhic retribution on the company who put an end to “The Leviathan” by literally annihilating The Walt Disney Corporation before our very eyes. “This film is a love letter to my favorite corporation,” he wrote in an accompanying statement. “I really just love corporations.”

Clearly no longer angling for a cushy Star Wars or Marvel gig, Robinson concludes, “For the future it’s hard to say. I made a ‘psycho robot best friend’ short film in 2011 and haven’t yet been able to get the feature made even though Bad Robot were interested at one point. Since then there have been several psycho robot friend movies. Maybe I still can make it. Maybe it’s dead. Dueling giant meteor movies came out in 1998 but there was also a third that never got made, written by James Cameron, called Bright Angel Falling. But nothing is ever really dead in Hollywood. Work on Last Voyage of the Demeter started in 1992.”

Perhaps Robinson is right, and the waiting game will eventually find Hollywood yielding to the fact that we need – like the space whalers of Leviathan – to harvest new ideas or this whole industry will run out of gas, collapsing under the already crumbling pillar of nostalgia. Even producer Jeremy Latcham – one of the original architects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – once told me that “eventually we are going to run out of IP,” and that we have to start greenlighting originals even when they don't conform to a previously profitable paradigm. For the sake of the enduring creative spirit, let's hope “The Leviathan” is not dead, and will yet have its day.