Over the years, DC has found a way to cross its superheroes over with Godzilla, Aliens, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, and many more beloved properties and characters. One that, apparently, was just too hard to do? Star Wars. If you’ve been a longtime reader of the site, you likely know that Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, the creative team behind the best-selling Marvels miniseries, almost made a Superman/Star Wars crossover about a decade ago. At some point, Ross even shared some of the artwork online. But now, former DC editor and publisher Dan DiDio has chimed in with his version of what happened to the project.
To be fair, his version isn’t too far off from Busiek’s claims, which have been circulating for years. DiDio just has a couple of extra details packed in.
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Speaking at Tampa Bay Comic Convention, DiDio took responsibility for cancelling the project, saying that it “just didn’t make sense” and “wasn’t worth it.”
“I was brought a DC Universe and Star Wars crossover,” DiDio explained (via The PopVerse). “There was fighting over what you could and couldn’t do, and who gets the better shot, and who gets the hero moment…it wasn’t worth it. Honestly, it just wasn’t worth it.”
“The creator who came onboard got really angry because he brokered the deal and brought it to us,” DiDio added, referring to Busiek, who has publicly expressed frustration about the project’s failure. “I just didn’t want to do it at that time, because it didn’t make sense.”
Back in 2017, comics artist Phil Hester suggested that fans should ask their favorite creators about their “favorite rejected pitch” when talking with them at comic book conventions.
“Alex Ross and I were geared up to do Superman/Star Wars,” Busiek tweeted, “but the corporate parties involved couldn’t agree on how to divvy up the money. That’s not exactly a rejection, but it is a dead project.”
It seems likely any such negotiations would have happened during the years while Star Wars was at Dark Horse Comics, who published crossovers between Superman and the Aliens franchise, among others. A number of DC/Dark Horse crossover trade paperbacks were later made available, reprinting many of those stories for the first time.
DC continues to cross over with mid-sized publishers, but it has been several years since the “big two” last shared characters. The official line is that revenue sharing is too difficult to negotiate, although they did finally reissue the DC vs. Marvel miniseries, as well as a number of other crossover stories between DC and Marvel, in a pair of recent omnibus hardcovers.
Ross is currently crowdfunding a documentary looking behind-the-scenes at Kingdom Come, a series he developed for DC and then released with Mark Waid on to write scripts.
Marvel acquired the Star Wars license in 2015, shortly after Disney (Marvel’s parent company) acquired Lucasfilm, which produces Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. A line of Star Wars-related titles has been a big success for Marvel, and have provided the publishing line with stability in light of a recent sales downturn, but Marvel has not expressed any interest in crossing Star Wars over with any other property, even its own.
