Star Wars: McDiarmid Talks Scrapped Pre-Disney Palpatine TV Series

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

Star Wars: McDiarmid Discusses Scrapped Pre-Disney Palpatine TV Series

Ian McDiarmid (Star Wars: The Bad Batch) revealed that George Lucas had plans for a Palpatine TV Series before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.

Published Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:36:09 -0500
by Tom Chang
|
Comments

Article Summary

• Ian McDiarmid says George Lucas once pitched a Star Wars Palpatine TV series before Lucasfilm was sold to Disney.
• The planned Star Wars series would have followed Emperor Palpatine’s early reign between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.
• McDiarmid said Lucas compared Palpatine’s rise to Hitler’s and teased an assassination attempt that would not succeed.
• The reveal raises new questions about whether the scrapped Palpatine project was tied to George Lucas’s long-lost Star Wars Underworld.

As we're in year 14 of the Disney era of Star Wars, we're getting a picture of what could have been had creator George Lucas' plans beyond the prequel films that came out from 1999 to 2005, which include his own incarnations of episodes 7-9, and what would come to be Star Wars Underworld, a darker, grittier side of the franchise in a TV series form with longtime collaborator producer Rick McCallum and writer and For All Mankind creator Ronald D. Moore as possible showrunner. According to McCallum, a plan was in place for HBO to hear out the pitch before things fell apart internally at the network end, before it was ultimately scrapped, and Lucasfilm was sold to Disney in 2012. Coincidentally, at SpaceCon 2026 in San Antonio, Texas, Ian McDiarmid, who played Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Sheev Palpatine, shared the stage with Jimmy Smits (Sen. Bail Organa) and Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader) for the Star Wars Legacy panel to reveal a Palpatine TV series was pitched that would have paralleled the rise of a certain 20th century dictator before it was scrapped.

Star Wars Star Ian McDiarmid Reveals a Palpatine TV Series That Would Have Followed Him During His Early Reign Between 'Revenge of the Sith' and 'A New Hope'

"[George Lucas] was talking about, I think I can tell you now, a television series," McDiarmid told the crowd (via The Force of Others). "At the time, we didn't think about Star Wars in terms of a television series. Very speculative. We had lunch one day, and he said I've got this idea, and I hope you might want to be involved. We could sort of follow the Emperor's progress, like Hitler's, some of that. There might be an assassination attempt, and of course, it wouldn't succeed. It sounded really exciting. And he also said that maybe you could direct one, and then I fainted. But sadly, that didn't come to pass."

Since this is the first we've heard of this show, could that mean Underworld? There have been several other shows that have featured the Emperor, largely in animated series and voiced by several other actors, including McDiarmid, who have shown him interacting primarily with his apprentice, Darth Vader. McDiarmid would make his live-action return to the role after 14 years in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker, the final in the Skywalker Saga that would borrow from the Expanded Universe, now Legends, storyline of the Emperor successfully cloning himself. For more, you can check out the video.

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!