Summary
- Consider recasting legacy Star Wars characters for the franchise's future.
- New animated series "Maul: Shadow Lord" highlights number of returns Maul has made.
- "The Mandalorian and Grogu" trailer shown at Celebration lacks showing new threats.
This weekend saw Star Wars fans line up by their thousands in Japan to see cast and crew from the franchise, to share their love for the property, and to see what’s on Lucasfilm’s horizon for new films and TV shows.
For many fans at home waiting at home for the franchise to finally gain some momentum to move towards, almost six years since the release of the series’ last mainline entry, the announcements coming from Tokyo weren’t quite the jolt of energy the series’ waning fans needed.
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Whilst we did get our first details for Shawn Levy’s Ryan Gosling-starring Star Wars: Starfighter as well as Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's troubled Rey sequel, both set in the ‘future’ (after the events of The Rise of Skywalker), much of the rest of the announcements were focused firmly on the franchise's past characters and eras.
Beating a dead Sith
Perhaps the biggest new reveal from Celebration was the reveal of Maul: Shadow Lord, a new animated series following the galaxy’s most persistent Sith lord-turned mercenary, set between his appearances in The Clone Wars and Rebels.
This would mark the fourth separate on-screen appearance Maul has made since his brief role in The Phantom Menace, graduating from a non-speaking enforcer bisected by Obi-Wan Kenobi to a galaxy-spanning cockroach, jumping from one certain death to another across decades.
Dave Filoni has already brought Maul back from presumed death more than once now, and yet another series focused on a villain for whom depth was never a strong suit shows an obsession with legacy characters, both from his own shows and from his mentor Lucas’ films. Joining Maul in his first solo series is a character speculated to be the re-introduction of Legends character Darth Talon and a character from Filoni's Ahsoka series, the inquisitor Marrok.
Ahsoka is another series building upon the lore of Filoni's animated output- In its first season, the show almost served as a sequel series to Rebels, featuring most of its characters alongside some unexpected Clone Wars flashbacks. Here we saw Hayden Christensen return as Anakin, meeting his on-screen apprentice in live action for the first time in a vision that, whilst gratuitous, was relatively brief.
Ahead of its second season later this year, Filoni used Celebration as a platform to confirm the return of Christensen’s Anakin to the show, once again dwelling on the relationships and dynamics established in his past series.
The Mandalorian and Grogu and the never-ending Empire
The most concrete and fully-fleshed project shown off at this year’s Celebration was The Mandalorian and Grogu, co-written by Filoni alongside director Jon Favreau. A continuation of the pair’s adventures from Disney’s first foray into live-action Star Wars television, The Mandalorian was no stranger to recurring Filoni characters, and that seems sure to continue in the big-screen follow-up.
The trailer shown to attendees, which hasn’t yet been released officially, shows off not only Zeb, the only one of Filoni’s Rebels crew not already brought to life in Ahsoka, but also gives a brief glimpse at the now-unrecognisable Rotta the Hutt, the tempestuous baby Hutt from Filoni’s ill-fated 2007 Clone Wars film, bizarrely brought to life in this iteration by The Bear’s Jeremy Allen-White and some uncanny CGI biceps.
Perhaps more noticeable in this glimpse at the first Star Wars movie released in over half a decade was the distinct lack of any sort of new threat shown off. Whilst The Mandalorian saw our titular bounty hunter face off against Moff Gideon’s surviving imperial splinter cell, the show’s third season promised a future beyond just storm troopers and star destroyers.
In the film’s trailer, we see part of an impressive one-take action sequence where Din takes out the stormtroopers inside an AT-AT before felling the giant tank, as well as the implication that Din and Grogu are working to take down the Empire yet again in the service of Sigourney Weaver's rebel pilot, one of the film's seemingly few new characters.
Whilst Lucasfilm might be holding some real surprises close to their chest for now, it’s hard not to be curious whether there’s more to the film’s threat. Naturally, like the three seasons preceding it and its sister show Ahsoka, it’ll be difficult to make the film’s events feel consequential when it’s sandwiched in-between trilogies on the timeline, with no characters that we know of still present by the time of the sequels.
Now that we’re over forty years after the release of Return of the Jedi and with plenty of years passed in-universe since the defeat of the empire too, can we really not do any better than stormtoopers and Hutts?
The future in the past
Whilst there are of course the aforementioned films finally moving into the time following The Rise of Skywalker, fully unshackled from the events laid out in-canon so far, the franchise also needs to remember the potential in the time before any of our current films are set.
High Republic-set series The Acolyte may have landed to mixed critic feedback and inflamed some sections of the fanbase, but it did at least give us a fresh era of Star Wars, set over a hundred years before the events of The Phantom Menace. The show will not be receiving a second season, which is a blow to the franchise’s future interest in the Jedi’s golden age, but hopefully not the last time this era is seen on-screen.
Lucasfilm did not provide any updates on James Mangold’s even further-back prequel film following the first Jedi (?), though they did confirm it’s still in the works, giving some hope that perhaps the distant past of this universe could provide some fresh perspective. Also confirmed to still be on the way was Taika Waititi’s project, though its place in the timeline is still unclear at this point.
Before the Star Wars franchise sets its course for the future, Lucasfilm will first focus on the imminent release ofthe second season of Andor, a series set in the franchise's past but has no issues embracing new and exciting themes, which will drop in three-episode batches each week from April 22 on Disney+.
