Former Game of Thrones show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are “regretfully stepping away” from their Star Wars trilogy project that was announced February of last year.
Benioff and Weiss have stated that they will not be able to commit to both Disney Lucasfilm and Netflix at the same time and have decided to drop out of the future Star Wars trilogy.
The writers’ Disney deal to produce and write the future trilogy was widely publicized, with last year’s minor ramblings about the deteriorating quality of Game of Thrones after airing its seventh season and coming full circle with the huge amount of public outrage after the conclusion of the HBO show’s eighth and final season.
Even with the fact that Thrones did not end on a very high note, Deadline reported back in May that the duo was being bid on by six juggernaut media companies, namely HBO, Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Comcast, and Apple but finally decided to leave HBO for Netflix in an estimated $200 million deal to write and produce shows for the streaming giant.
According to a statement they released this Tuesday via Deadline, the duo explained that they surmised that they could not do justice to both their upcoming Netflix projects and the Star Wars trilogy which is why decided to step away from it. They further added that they loved Star Wars and said that when George Lucas created it, he built them as well, admitting that they will always be indebted to the franchise for being an inspiration to them.
Kathleen Kennedy, Lucasfilm president supported their statement, claiming that Benioff and Weiss are amazing storytellers and hopes that the two could return after their busy schedules to partake in the Star Wars journey.
This news will be a relief for a lot, if not for most Star Wars fans though, as a lot of them are also Game of Thrones fans and were not afraid to air out their grievances. Benioff and Weiss have both been strongly criticized and flamed in most social media platforms since the conclusion of Game of Thrones season 8, particularly in Twitter and Reddit, where a sub-forum of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series called r/ Freefolk had made it a point to make sure everyone knows that the two writers were horrible at their jobs, with an internet-wide venture of imbuing them the title of “bad writers” on Google’s search engine which is still strongly prevalent today.