Leonardo DiCaprio Passed On Star Wars For A Movie That Never Got Made
There was a time when we were waiting on the edge of our seats for what J.J. Abrams and company would do with the beginning of the Star Wars sequel trilogy of movies. While some main player like Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill had been confirmed to return, the rest of the landscape wasn’t so clear. So it was interesting when a bit of information contained in a report that piqued our interest, and that news involved Leonardo DiCaprio and Robotech.
Latino Review reported that Leonardo DiCaprio was up for a role in the additions to the Star Wars films though it wasn’t specified whether it would be a one off, or for the entire trilogy. But he passed.
You may ask yourself how can anyone, let alone a young man of Leonardo DiCaprio’s generation, who came of age in the midst of Star Wars becoming perhaps the biggest pop culture institution of all time, skip out on such an opportunity?
The answer for Leonardo DiCaprio sounds pretty straightforward. He apparently wanted to participate in another project in development at the time, and that project is god damn Robotech.
For those of you not familiar with Robotech, it is a classic Japanese anime series. In reality, it encompasses so much more than that. There are multiple cartoon series, movies, games, novels, comics, and more.
Leonardo DiCaprio would have joined a sprawling, expansive world, and one of the first anime to air in the US. The basic premise is that there are giant mechs created using technology from a wrecked alien spacecraft, are employed to fend off alien invaders.
If you say to yourself, that sounds suspiciously like story elements from Pacific Rim, then you are very astute, Grasshopper. Guillermo del Toro’s latest adventure owes a great debt, both aesthetically and story wise, to predecessors like Robotech.
A Robotech movie had been in the works seemingly forever, at least since 2007, with names like Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back) attached to write the script. The last we heard back then was when commercial director Nic Mathieu became the first director attached to take the helm.
Still, this seemed like as good a time as any to kick a Robotech adaptation into high gear. Pacific Rim was doing okay at the box office—at least, it was in people’s minds.
And if a star the size and caliber of Leonardo DiCaprio was circling the proceedings, there must have been at least some meat to this story.
The problem was that Leonardo DiCaprio passed on the Star Wars film, and then, as often happens in Hollywood, the Robotech movie never got made—at least not with him attached.
Are there regrets? Leonardo DiCaprio’s star shines bright enough that “missing” on Star Wars isn’t a career killer. But it’s an interesting “what if” with both the franchise and the actor’s career.
