The success of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has proven what most of us knew all along: There’s a vast appetite for more live-action adventures in the Star Wars universe even with tales that fall outside of the main saga. Disney and Lucasfilm may have rendered the Expanded Universe stories non-canon, but the franchise still has an incredibly expansive mythology that’s only getting bigger.

An image from the cancelled Star Wars 1313 game, which would've been set in the underworld of Coruscant

Star Wars: Underworld

Obi-Wan Kenobi visited the lower levels of Coruscant in Attack of the Clones.

Star Wars: 1313

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Fallen Jedi

Asajj Ventress and Quinlan Vos

The Black Sun

The Black Sun's Prince Xizor

Bounty Hunters

Bounty hunters. We don’t need their scum.

Han Solo’s standalone film is already lined up for 2018, followed by Episode IX in 2019, but we currently have no idea about which Star Wars anthology movie will follow that in 2020. At one point, Fantastic Four director Josh Trank was slated to helm an untitled Star Wars film -- possibly about Boba Fett -- but we haven’t heard much about that project since he and Lucasfilm parted ways.Disney isn’t likely to let a year pass between Star Wars movies, so it’s only a matter of time before a new director signs on for the third anthology and we learn what it’s going to be about. In the meantime, we’ve got a few ideas about what we’d love to see in future spinoffs, and we’re starting off by taking a look at the Star Wars underworld...Ever since Disney purchased Lucasfilm, the proposed Star Wars: Underworld TV series has been largely forgotten and abandoned. But at one point, George Lucas fully intended to make this project, and he recruited writers like Ronald D. Moore, Tony McNamara, Stephen Scaia, and Fiona Seres to develop the show and write scripts.The series would have reportedly explored the Coruscant underworld with new characters set in the time period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. The underworld was briefly glimpsed in Attack of the Clones, and it offered an opportunity to explore the darker corners of the Star Wars universe. Producer Rick McCallum openly called it “Deadwood in Space” and noted that it would have fleshed out a few of the characters from the novels while dealing with some of the important moments from Han Solo and Princess Leia’s backstories (without making them the central characters).This still seems like an area ripe for exploration in the Star Wars movies, and you have to figure all those story ideas from the TV show (and perhaps concept art as well) are still lying around at Lucasfilm, just waiting to get exploited in some way.The Star Wars: 1313 video game was another casualty of the Disney deal, but it was further along than Underworld. It also would have taken place on Coruscant, specifically on “level 1313.” Lucasarts even showed off some of the gameplay footage in 2012. The game was rumored to follow a young Boba Fett before he became the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy, so perhaps it was something along the lines of Boba Fett Begins.Back in 2015, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy hinted that both Underworld and 1313 were potentially still on the table. She told Slash Film “that’s an area we’ve spent a lot of time [on], reading through the material that [Lucas] developed is something we very much would like to explore. And there was 1313, the game where there was [unbelievable concept art] . So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold. And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”Rogue One didn’t need a Jedi main character to connect with audiences, but the Star Wars underworld is another opportunity to depict what happened to some of the Jedi who managed to stay under the Empire’s radar. As much as we’d love to see Darth Vader hunting down the last of the Jedi (as alluded to in the original film), it may be even more interesting to see morally conflicted Jedi like Quinlan Vos, or his lover Asajj Ventress, reinvent themselves as criminals. The movie Jedi have always been essentially depicted as saints, but the EU has shown us that there can definitely be shades of grey to some of these characters. A bounty hunter with a lightsaber? Think of the possibilities!Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is somewhat divisive among Star Wars fans, and it’s no longer in continuity. However, there are still some elements in that tale that are potentially worth exploring, like the criminal syndicate the Black Sun. That group’s Prince Xizor was originally presented as someone who posed a real threat to Darth Vader’s standing within the Empire, and there’s something very enticing about giving the Dark Lord of the Sith a rival who isn’t intimidated by him. We saw with Rogue One that Vader can still work, and work well, onscreen, so a Vader-Xizor dynamic could be amazing. Also, Xizor’s android bodyguard Guri had an intriguing arc of her own, as she seemed to gain a measure of sentience.Even if Lucasfilm isn’t interested in revisiting either of those characters, the idea of the Black Sun itself is very intriguing. It was supposed to be the largest criminal organization in the galaxy, so that suggests the possibility of giving Star Wars a real crime epic as the Black Sun clashes with other criminal groups like the Hutts.“Bounty hunters. We don’t need their scum.” Except we totally do. Those brief moments of the bounty hunters in The Empire Strikes Back struck a chord with fans that still resonates today. Obviously Boba Fett is the most popular bounty hunter of that group, but we’d love to know more about the assassin droid known as IG-88, which was essentially its own boss. The other characters like Bossk and Dengar were also visually intriguing, and their backstories are wide open now that the previous continuity is gone.However, there’s no reason that a new Star Wars film couldn’t introduce even more bounty hunters to the mix. It seems like a popular profession in that universe, and they could be the perfect characters to place as the leads of a more mature Star Wars story.It may be sometime before Lucasfilm announces its plans for the third anthology, but the abundance of material in the Star Wars underworld has us hoping that it will come to the forefront. What do you want to see in the Star Wars spinoff films? Let us know in the comments!

Blair Marnell is a freelance writer whose work can be found all over the Internet. You can talk to Blair on Twitter at