Guillermo del Toro did not direct a Star Wars movie.
He did not get to make his long-rumored Jabba the Hutt film.
But somehow, beautifully, he still ended up near the Hutts.
Jon Favreau has revealed that del Toro receives an acknowledgment credit in The Mandalorian & Grogu after giving creative suggestions about the Hutts featured in the film. In an interview with Vandal, Favreau explained that del Toro had spent a lot of time thinking about Hutts because of his own abandoned Jabba project, and that he shared ideas with the Mandalorian & Grogu team.
The Hutt Expert Star Wars Almost Used
This is one of those behind-the-scenes details that feels small at first, then immediately gets more interesting the longer you stare at it.
Del Toro has history with Hutt material. Back in 2023, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the filmmaker confirmed he had worked on a now-scrapped Star Wars movie centered on Jabba the Hutt, with David S. Goyer involved as writer.
That abandoned project has become one of the more fascinating Star Wars “what ifs.” Del Toro’s entire career has been built on monsters, creatures, grotesque beauty, tragic outsiders, and practical texture. A Jabba movie from him could have been deeply weird, probably disgusting, and possibly magnificent.
Which is to say: exactly the kind of thing Star Wars occasionally needs.
Why This Matters for The Mandalorian & Grogu
The Mandalorian & Grogu is already leaning harder into Hutt territory than the Disney+ series usually did. The film includes Rotta the Hutt, Jabba’s son from The Clone Wars, voiced by Jeremy Allen White, and the story also brings Din Djarin and Grogu into contact with Hutt interests during the post-Empire chaos.
That makes del Toro’s acknowledgment credit more than a cute trivia note. If you are building new Hutt material — especially for a theatrical Star Wars movie — getting input from the guy who once developed a Jabba film is not exactly a bad idea.
The Hutts are not just “big space gangsters.” At their best, they are gross aristocracy, crime dynasty, creature design, body horror, old money, and moral rot all rolled into one slug-shaped nightmare. That is very much del Toro territory.
Favreau Is Playing With the Toy Box Carefully
Favreau has always been good at treating Star Wars like a toy box with consequences. He will happily bring back a deep-cut alien, a bounty hunter, a weird droid, or an old creature design — but the better Mandalorian material usually works because it remembers why those things felt fun in the first place.
Bringing in del Toro’s Hutt brain fits that approach. It suggests Favreau was not just using the Hutts as recognizable background flavor. He wanted texture. History. A little grime under the fingernails.
And honestly, if anyone should be asked, “How disgusting and royal should this Hutt feel?” it is probably Guillermo del Toro.
A Scrapped Star Wars Movie Leaves a Slime Trail
The best part of this story is how very Star Wars it feels.
A movie that never happened. A filmmaker who almost entered the galaxy. A creature empire that keeps oozing back into the spotlight. And now, years later, a tiny acknowledgment credit in a completely different project.
That is how Star Wars works sometimes. Nothing ever fully disappears. It just waits in the background until someone opens the right archive drawer.
For more on how The Mandalorian & Grogu is shaping up, including the new gangster-inspired planet Shakari, you can read our earlier breakdown of Shakari and the film’s Prohibition-era crime-world energy.
Del Toro did not get his Jabba movie.
But his Hutt knowledge still found a way into Star Wars.
The slime always returns.
