Star Wars: Return of the Jedi seemed like the perfect place to prove Boba Fett's reputation as the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy. Of course, that’s not how the 1983 sequel played out. Instead, when Luke Skywalker enacted his rescue plan aboard Jabba’s sail barge, a blind Han Solo accidentally struck Boba’s jet pack, causing it to malfunction and send the villain careening into the sarlacc pit, to his apparent death.
After his cinematic introduction in The Empire Strikes Back, Boba Fett quickly became a fan-favorite character. But instead of receiving more screen time in Return of the Jedi, the bounty hunter was unceremoniously written out by the end of the first act. It was a humiliating end, to be sure, but there was actually a good (and practical) reason why Boba wound up as a snack for the sarlacc: George Lucas’ dissatisfaction with an incredibly complex scene.
In Lucasfilm historian's Jonathan W. Rinzler's 2013 book The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, editor Duwayne Dunham recalled just how complicated the sail barge scene was. “It was something like an edit every eleventh frame," he said. "It was crazy.” According to Dunham, there were more edits in that single scene than there were in many entire films of the era. Doing anything more with Boba Fett might, simply, have been too much for editors to handle, so Lucas dumped him, literally, from the already-tricky sequence.
"It seemed to me that George was somehow disappointed with who Boba Fett had become," Dunham said. "I don’t know whether it was the way it was shot, but Boba didn’t measure up to some standard George had.” From that, it seems Lucas was just as dissatisfied with Boba’s fate as everyone else. "Just throw him in the pit," Lucas is quoted as saying.
“I’m not sure we did that battle as well as we could’ve,” Lucas recalled. “There are so many characters and we have so many pieces of action that are supposed to be happening at exactly the same moment. You get into a very complex piece of cinema, editing things together that you want people to ‘read,’ but you don’t want to dwell on so long that it drags down a simultaneous moment. We did it as well as we could, but I had this nagging feeling that we could’ve done better.”
Although most fans at the time of Return of the Jedi believed the mysterious bounty hunter dead, doomed to be slowly digested over a thousand years in the Pit of Carkoon, Star Wars comics depicted his escape as early as 1983. Lucas admitted in the commentary for the film's 2004 DVD release that he considered adding a scene in which Boba Fett crawls out of the sarlacc pit, but acknowledged, "that doesn't quite fit in the end."
Rinzler confirmed in 2014 that Lucas believed Boba Fett had survived the events of Return of the Jedi (but that Emperor Palpatine hadn't). That was well before that view was made canon by in 2020 by The Mandalorian Season 2, in which Temuera Morrison played the aging bounty hunter, returned to first reclaim his armor and then to seize whatever remains of Jabba the Hutt's former criminal empire.
Presumably, The Book of Boba Fett will provide details about how Boba Fett survived the sarlacc, even as the Disney+ spinoff explored his new role as crime lord, filling the power vacuum left on Tatooine by Jabba the Hutt, who most certainly did die in Return of the Jedi.