Star Wars producer Rick McCallum has described planned TV spinoff Underworld as "Empire Strikes Back on steroids".
McCallum recently confirmed the working title for the project and later revealed that the final series would include "smugglers, gangsters [and] bounty hunters".
"It's much darker [than the movies]," he told Collider. "It's a much more adult series. I think, thematically, in terms of characters and what they go through, it will be… the most awesome part of the whole franchise."
McCallum also compared Underworld to "[HBO drama] Deadwood in space".
He explained: "It was to be serious performances, very complicated relationships, unbelievable issues of power and corruption, greed, vanity, pride, ego manifesting itself at levels that only equal the world that we live in now, but, as I said, on steroids."
Adding that production would not commence for "the next year or two years", McCallum explained that George Lucas plans to populate Underworld with "extraordinary digital characters", making the show financially prohibitive in the current economic climate.
"Most people who love movies and... understand the process realise that if you do a character like Gollum or Jar Jar or any major digital character, that costs twice as much as having Tom Cruise in a movie," he suggested.
"You get 150 people working for two years on a 40-minute performance and they all make serious money [so] that's gonna be a serious $20-30 million character. That's our problem, how do we get that down?
"It's not a challenge that I think can be dealt with in the next year or two years, I think it's gonna be a little bit more longer term goal."
