A clearer picture is beginning to emerge regarding why Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss opted to abandon their planned Star Wars trilogy. The news of Benioff and Weiss’s Star Wars exit broke Monday, not long after the two’s strangely candid panel at the Austin Film Festival—leaving fans to wonder what, exactly, prompted the decision. In making the announcement the two cited their Netflix deal—and according to a new report, that is part of the reason they defected. But the full picture is also reportedly a little more complicated.

According to the Hollywood Reporter,* Benioff and Weiss’s Star Wars exit had been in the works since August. THR affirms that the reason the two wound up walking away partially had to do with their Netflix deal—but another factor that prompted the decision, the trade adds, was “toxic fandom.”

As THR notes, Benioff and Weiss inked their deal with Lucasfilm in February of 2018—months before the underwhelming debut of Solo: A Star Wars Story and more than a year before their series would round out with a widely maligned final season. (Following the Game of Thrones backlash, the two even opted to skip the show’s San Diego Comic-Con panel earlier this year.) As Benioff and Weiss watched Star Wars fans bully actors and directors, a source told THR, they began to have doubts about whether they should dip their toes in as well. “Who wants to go through that again? Not them,” the source said. “This was in the ‘Life’s Too Short’ category.”

THR also reports that Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy was not happy that Benioff and Weiss struck a deal with Netflix, as she was not convinced they could create the trilogy they’d promised Star Wars while also conceiving and overseeing projects for the streaming giant at the same time. (Per THR, this whole ordeal has only boosted tensions between Disney and Netflix, which have fallen into a rivalry ever since Disney began pulling titles from Netflix in preparation for its own streaming service; Disney, the trade claims, was itself among the studios that initially tried to seal an overall deal with Benioff and Weiss.)

A source told THR that Benioff and Weiss’s Netflix deal requires that they exclusively work on the sets of the projects they create during production. That said, another source said Netflix had been prepared to wait for Benioff and Weiss to finish their Star Wars trilogy before they began work on streaming projects. The company reportedly found out about their exit from the project only days before the news went public. Whatever the pair’s reasons, Lucasfilm now finds itself in a strange position. Its Skywalker saga is about to come to an end with The Rise of Skywalker, and with no firm future film plans, all of the galaxy’s hope now rests on The Mandalorian. Good luck, Jon Favreau.

Representatives for Disney, Netflix, Lucasfilm, and Benioff and Weiss declined to comment when contacted by THR. Representatives for those entities did not immediately respond to V.F.’s requests for further comment.

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