During Star Wars Celebration, LucasFilm announced a new film by Dave Filoni, which many expect to be a grand finale for The Mandalorian. But will it? The answer is complicated.
Speaking with IGN in a new interview, Filoni said he thinks of the period where the movie is set as less of a “Mandalorian era” and more of a “New Republic period.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it [a finale]. I think of the time period now as the New Republic time period, and it’s something that has existed long before we were ever making the Mandalorian. The idea that after Return of the Jedi there was a New Republic, and that the heroes still had to defend that Republic from the remnant Empire is a very old idea that we brought into the first season of the Mandalorian. Because it’s what was always there.”
He went on to explain that he has a “very large whiteboarad timeline” that connects the overall story, which he’ll diagram “like a crime scene.” And with so many important characters, including Mandalorian Season 3’s Bo-Katan, whom he names directly, it was inevitable that the scale of the story would start to get bigger.
“I think the story just escalated to the point where Jon [Favreau] and I were talking about it and we’ve had a plan for a while,” Filoni said when asked why he wanted to make a film. “It just seems like the next logical step. The story also I think is, like I said, grown to a point that we want to expand a bit and do a little bit of a bigger thing than we’ve been doing on our streaming shows.”
Filoni doesn’t say what “story” he’s talking about in particular, but his “streaming shows” include The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and The Book of Boba Fett which have so far been interwoven, with characters of all three appearing in different episodes together.
Favreau seemes to suggest this too. “We knew the story would culminate. You have little culminations that come with each season. You have characters and things that thread in and out,” he told IGN.
“Those characters and these storylines start to demand that you’re starting to deal with larger forces and bigger trends within that time period. So at a certain point the rubber is going to hit the road in many ways.
“And the fact that now audiences will accept a permeability between media, which I think has been, as you see with the Star Wars films and with the Marvel films, there’s a lot of… Audiences are very sophisticated now, and if they’re invested in the characters and the stories, you can tell types of stories in one medium that you can’t with the other.”
So at a certain point the rubber is going to hit the road in many ways.
A logical conclusion
The concept was teased by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, too, who told IGN that the team is “very intentionally” intersecting these characters now in the lead up to Filoni’s film.
When asked if Lucasfilm would bring more characters from the Star Wars animated shows to live-action, Kennedy said “I wouldn’t do it without Dave.
“Dave created so much of what was in Clone Wars and Rebels, and that extension of that storytelling is something that’s Dave’s. And certainly working with him to try to evolve that into… whether we do [it] with live action, whether it’s a series, or whether we go into features, that’s something we would do with him.”
When asked if we’ll see more crossovers like Ahsoka appearing in The Mandalorian, Din Djarin in The Book of Boba Fett, and so on, however, Kennedy said: “Well, that’s really building toward what Dave’s doing in the feature space. Very intentionally.”
This is just the latest development in a long line of news coming out of Star Wars Celebration. The Mandalorian’s other executive producer has confirmed Din Djarin is no longer the only main character, we learned that Daisy Ridley is returning for another Star Wars film, and even that Rogue Squadron may not be gone for good.
You can read about absolutely everything announced right here though, and otherwise stay tuned with IGN for more Star Wars news.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
