Earlier this week it was announced that that Game of Thrones series creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, dropped out of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars project saying, "There are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects. So we are regretfully stepping away."

Well, a new report claims that Disney actually removed them from the Star Wars project shortly after the Game of Thrones series finale. That finale was apparently responsible for killing Benioff and Weiss' Star Wars project and the reason it was officially announced this week is because of the comments Benioff and Weiss made recently at an event in Austin. This news comes from Vanity Fair reporter Joanna Robinson's The Storm podcast:

"On a Patreon-only episode of The Storm podcast (formerly Storm of Spoilers) Joanna Robinson (primary GoT reporter for Vanity Fair, also covers Star Wars and Marvel) reported that the decision to remove B and W was made in May, before the Netflix deal. She says (according to Disney sources) that it was a “soft” removal and was not announced in order to allow B and W to shop their services elsewhere. She suggested that B and W’s comments about GoT last weekend at an event in Austin may have sped up the announcement... she said the decision was made after the final episode of GoT, after Iger had made his announcement about the next film." - Reddit user paxtoncrwford

That seems to make sense to me. While we don’t know if this is true or not, Benioff and Wiess did make some strange and stupid comments at the Austin Film Festival. There’s a whole Twitter thread that you can read here where they admitted they didn’t know much about Game of Thrones, the world or the characters. They said that they didn’t know why George R.R. Martin trusted them with his life’s work.

They went on to admit they had no experience and no knowledge of what it took to make a TV show. They had no qualifications before they were hired and said the whole experience was an expensive film school for them and a learning experience. They didn’t know anything going into this! They found themselves way over their heads and the final couple of seasons proved that they had no idea what to do. It was very clear.

They explained that after they produced a season filled with 39-minute episodes, HBO asked for an additional 100 minutes to fulfill their contractual obligations. So, they added, for example, a shared scene with Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister, who previously never shared scenes in the entire season.

It was also revealed that plan was to downplay the fantasy elements to help expand the fan base to include “mothers, NFL players”… what!? They also never really tried and boil down all of the books’ essential elements, saying “No. We didn’t. The scope was too big. It was about the scenes we were trying to depict and the show was about power.”

It’s insane to me that the show managed to survive as long as it did under the guidance of these guys! They literally faked it until they made it! Disney and Lucasfilm certainly dodged a bullet and after learning about this I’m glad that they aren’t making any Star Wars movies! They’re Netflix’s problem now!