Ah, what might have been. Guillermo del Toro, that most warm-hearted and genial of film-makers, was once due to direct The Hobbit, back when it was still a simple celluloid fable about a hairy homunculus and his merry band of dwarf companions, rather than a sprawling trilogy replete with unwieldy elf-dwarf romances and scary orc villains you never remembered from the book. Now it turns out the Mexican director was also once in talks to direct a Star Wars movie – and thanks to comments he made in 2015, we have a pretty good idea what it would have been about.

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“I would do the sort of Godfather saga that Jabba the Hutt had to go through to gain control,” Del Toro mused to Yahoo! a couple of years back, when asked if he’d like to take on Star Wars. “One, because it’s the character that looks the most like me, and I like him. I love the idea of a Hutt type of mafia, a very complex coup. I just love the character.”

With the Pan’s Labyrinth director’s noted love of animatronics, it’s possible to imagine Jabba reinvented for the 21st century, no longer the beached slug that took four puppeteers to animate in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, nor the preposterously mobile CGI version that turned up in the 1997 special edition of Star Wars, and later The Phantom Menace. Del Toro’s take might even have ended up as the definitive take on the Huttese gangster, though one imagines the sheer scale of the special effects work involved in creating an entire trilogy of films about him would most likely have torpedoed the whole project before it ever began. And that’s if audiences could be persuaded to really give a damn about a figure who’s about as repugnant as Star Wars gets, both physically and morally. Still, you would have liked to see Del Toro try.

The same cannot necessarily be said about some of the Star Wars saga’s other “lost” films over the past 40 years. As detailed in a 1980 interview with Prevue magazine, George Lucas once had mad schemes for a Wookiee movie featuring Chewbacca and his bear-like breed, as well as a separate spin-off about the droids C-3PO and R2-D2. The closest we ever got to seeing the Wookiee film is probably the horrifyingly bad 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, in which Chewbacca’s pervy dad Itchy and his clan wait for Chewbacca and Han Solo to arrive on Kashyyyk, where the entire family is planning to celebrate something called Life Day. Notorious for its ineptitude – the late, great Carrie Fisher’s performance of the holiday’s “special” song to the Star Wars theme is particularly excruciating – the experience of watching the Holiday Special has been compared to the horror of being slowly digested over a thousand years in the pit of a Sarlacc’s stomach. As for the droid movie, Lucas gave us only the 1985 animated TV show Star Wars: Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO, which was cancelled after just one season due to high production costs. Despite a pleasingly doom-laden Vangelis-style soundtrack and Anthony Daniels reprising his role as C-3PO, the show does little to convince anyone that a full-length live action movie would have been worth the bother.

Rather more intriguing is Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, once Lucas’s planned sequel to 1977’s Star Wars. Convinced that his expensive space opera was bound to crash and burn at the box office, the film-maker commissioned the sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster to pen a novel which would form the basis of a cheap-to-film follow-up. With no money on the table for flashy space battles, most of the story takes place on a swampy jungle planet, while there is barely a mention of Han Solo and Chewbacca – Harrison Ford having not yet signed on to reprise his role as the sardonic smuggler. Moreover, Luke and Leia flirt it up a storm – Lucas having presumably not yet established their familial connection – and the male Skywalker takes on Darth Vader in a lightsaber battle while possessed by the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Naturally, Lucas abandoned plans to shoot Splinter of the Mind’s Eye when Star Wars broke all known box office records and Ford signed on the dotted line, allowing for the big-budget 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back. But Foster’s ideas about Kyber crystals – powerful, Force-sensitive material utilised by the Jedi in lightsabers – were not lost, with the plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story recently playing heavily on their vital role in the building of the first Death Star.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The director Joe Johnston has said he wanted to make a spin-off film about Boba Fett. Photograph: Atlaspix / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Empire was also the big-screen outing in which the bounty hunter Boba Fett first debuted in the long-running space saga, though he was later digitally parachuted into the Special Edition release of Star Wars. Han Solo’s nemesis has been a fan favourite since the beginning and there have been numerous plans to give him his own film over the years. In 2011, while promoting Captain America: The First Avenger, the director Joe Johnston told ScreenRant he had been trying to persuade Lucas to let him take charge of a spin-off about Fett. The idea had a certain symmetry, since the young Johnston helped design the bounty hunter’s famous Mandalorian armour.

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But Lucasfilm came much closer to green-lighting a Boba Fett origin tale in 2015, three years after being taken over by Disney. So close was the studio to announcing the film that a teaser reel was prepared for 2015’s Star Wars Celebration, only to be thrown back in the can following proposed director Josh Trank’s bizarre behaviour during the shoot for that same year’s Fantastic Four. Nobody knows quite what the movie would have been about, but there have been rumours the project could be revived following the barnstorming box office success of Rogue One. After all, if Lucasfilm can make the guy who built the Death Star into a hero, they can surely do something similar for Darth Vader’s favourite henchman.

One lost Star Wars movie that almost certainly won’t be seeing the light of day in the post-Lucas galaxy far, far away is the veteran director’s own version of Episode VII, which according to a 2015 Vanity Fair report would have focused on younger teenagers (yep, like The Phantom Menace), rather than the blend of twenty-somethings and returning older stars seen in JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens. It would have kicked off a new trilogy of movies set several decades after Return of the Jedi, with Lucas having reached out to the stars Mark Hamill, Ford and Fisher even before approaching Disney with dollar signs in his eyes and Hollywood’s most lucrative science fiction franchise on the table.

The Mouse House, of course, rejected Lucas’s treatments out of hand after buying all rights to the saga for $4bn in October 2012. We will never know if Jar Jar Binks survived the prequels to fight another day, or which plucky young ingenue the film-maker had in mind to step into the dusty shoes of the unfortunate Jake Lloyd. So the next time you feel like criticising The Force Awakens for swiping virtually the entire plot of Star Wars, or complaining that Rogue One could have been a bit more cheery, just remember things could have been so much worse.