The Force Is Not With Us: Dave Filoni Just Closed the Door on The Hunt for Ben Solo
"Rey Skywalker." Two words closed out the sequel trilogy in 2019 — and at D23 2026, Dave Filoni made sure the door Ben Solo left cracked open stays shut. Between an Ahsoka Season 2 teaser and a full Star Wars: Starfighter reveal, the biggest Star Wars story out of Anaheim was the movie that isn't happening.
"Rey Skywalker." Two words, one dissolve, and a franchise closed a chapter it had spent a trilogy building toward. Whatever you think of The Rise of Skywalker — and reasonable people disagree, hard — it ended with Ben Solo dead in the sand of Exegol, having spent his last breath giving Rey a second life instead of taking one for himself. It was a genuinely moving beat in an otherwise chaotic movie, and it left a door cracked open that Adam Driver and Steven Soderbergh spent years quietly trying to walk back through.
That project had a name — The Hunt for Ben Solo — and at D23 2026, Dave Filoni shut it. Twice, for good measure.
"The Force Is Not With Us"
First came the soft no, in a Variety conversation where Filoni did his best Obi-Wan hand-wave: they're "not making that picture right now." Then, talking to Deadline later the same day, he dropped the line that's now everywhere: "It's not here; you won't find it here. The Force is not with us in that regard." No qualifier, no "never say never" wink. That's about as final as Lucasfilm gets without an actual press release titled "Cancelled."
For anyone who's followed this saga, that's a gut punch. Driver first confirmed the project existed in an AP interview back in October 2025 — a post-Rise of Skywalker redemption story for Kylo Ren, built with Soderbergh directing. It never got greenlit, but it never fully died either, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that lets a fandom build a mythology of its own. And build they did. Organizers flew banners over the Disney lot. Someone hired a skydiver. Daisy Ridley, Rian Johnson, even Kathleen Kennedy publicly said kind things about the idea. This wasn't a fringe ask — it had the closest thing Star Wars has to institutional goodwill behind it, and it still didn't move the needle.
Here's the thing worth sitting with: Filoni isn't wrong to say no. He's the guy who spent Ahsoka and Rebels proving that redemption arcs land harder when they're earned across years of storytelling, not retrofitted onto a character who's already dead. Ben Solo's death worked because it was final. Bringing him back as a hologram-adjacent Force ghost with a movie deal would cheapen the exact moment the sequel trilogy got right. I want The Hunt for Ben Solo to exist as much as anyone typing "Save Ben Solo" into a banner-plane order form. I also understand why the man running the franchise looked at it and said not now, maybe not ever.
The Rest of D23 Tells You Where the Energy Actually Is
If you only heard the Ben Solo headline, you missed the point of the panel. Lucasfilm didn't spend D23 apologizing — it spent D23 building. Ahsoka Season 2 got its first teaser, with Rosario Dawson, Hayden Christensen and Eman Esfandi on stage and a premiere date locked for January 20, 2027. The show is heading to Dathomir — Nightsister homeworld, live-action, for the first time ever, which is the kind of deep-cut payoff that makes twenty years of Clone Wars fans sit up straight. Thrawn's shadow is all over the marketing, and if Filoni's team sticks the landing the way Rebels did with Thrawn's introduction, this could be the best live-action arc since Andor.
Then Shawn Levy walked out with Ryan Gosling to properly unveil Star Wars: Starfighter, landing in theaters May 28, 2027. Gosling's character has a name now — Kade Auberon — and a logline that's deliberately vague on Skywalker-family baggage: "a cynical rogue confronted by his mysterious past" gets pulled into a galaxy-spanning chase toward destiny. No Jedi promised, no lightsaber teased in the marketing so far. That's either a bold swing at telling a Star Wars story that isn't about legacy characters, or a very careful way of not overpromising. Either way, it's the clearest signal yet of what Filoni actually wants to do with the job: new corners of the galaxy, not reheated sequel-trilogy plot threads.
Two Trilogies, Two Different Kinds of Closure
That's the real story underneath the Ben Solo news. This is a Lucasfilm run by someone who came up through The Clone Wars — a show that spent seven-plus seasons proving Star Wars works best when it expands sideways instead of circling back to the same nine movies. Filoni saying no to Ben Solo isn't him disrespecting the sequel era. It's him applying the same instinct that made Andor work and that's steering Ahsoka toward Dathomir: tell new stories in this galaxy instead of relitigating the ending of the last one.
Does that sting if you're still not over Ben Solo's death? Absolutely. The Rise of Skywalker is a messy movie that fans have spent six years trying to fix in their heads, and "what if he just... came back" was always going to be the fantasy version of a fix. But Star Wars has never been shy about killing people and meaning it — Obi-Wan on the Death Star, Yoda in his hut, Luke becoming one with the Force on Ahch-To. Ben Solo joining that list, permanently, is at least consistent with how this saga treats its endings.
Where That Leaves Us
Nothing here is truly unconfirmed — Filoni's quotes are on the record, the Ahsoka date is locked, Starfighter's cast and logline are official. What's still open is whether "not right now" from Filoni ages into "never," the way most quietly shelved Lucasfilm projects do, or whether five more years of fan pressure eventually gets a different answer out of a different regime. Franchises change hands. Executives change their minds. I wouldn't bet the house on it, but I wouldn't burn the banner-plane receipt either.
For now, the galaxy's attention is correctly pointed at Dathomir and at Kade Auberon's cockpit, not at a movie that was never officially real in the first place. May the Force be with us — even when it isn't with Ben Solo.
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