Skeleton Crew Starts Filming -- Everything We Know So Far About the New Star Wars Live-Action Series

During Star Wars Celebration 2022, Lucasfilm confirmed that Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts is working on a new live-action Star Wars series for Disney Plus titled Skeleton Crew. Christopher Ford, who co-wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming and Chaos Walking, will be a writer and an executive producer on the series as well. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are also on board as executive producers.



The series, set in the Mandalorian era, will follow a group of kids who got lost in wild space. Jude Law is so far the only actor confirmed for the series, though details about his role remain under wraps. Watts said the following at the Celebration Stage:

They compared it to Clone Wars or Rebels in that it's a show kids can watch, but it's not a kids show. The concept art displayed at the panel matched the description of an Amblin-style series following four 10-years old across space. Rumored casting calls from earlier in the year revealed that Lucasfilm intended to cast kids between 11 and 12 to play the parts. They would be two males, one female, and one nonbinary person.







The release date was announced to be 2023, and according to a new report, it seems like they are right on track to hit that. Bespin Bulletin is saying that the new series started filming late June in Manhattan Beach Studios, where Ahsoka is also in production. Ahsoka will also be filming at the train yard location in El Segundo, where parts of both seasons of The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi were filmed. Skeleton Crew, on its end, will also film in an unknown studio in Culver City, and at California State University in Dominguez Hills, at some point during production.



No shooting schedule is known at this point, but if we look at past projects, we could speculate that cameras will be rolling through the entire summer and at least all of September and October. The Acolyte is currently rumored to start filming in early November, so it would match up that Skeleton Crew wraps up right before that. Since Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau are executive producers on both Skeleton Crew and Ahsoka, it makes sense that they are both shooting at the same time and in the same location. However, The Acolyte is a totally separate project, so if that series will be shooting in L.A. (something we don't know for certain yet), it would make sense that previous projects are wrapped by that point.







This is something Lucasfilm already pulled off last year. The Book of Boba Fett started shooting in Manhattan Beach in December 2020 and wrapped sometime in late April 2021 or early May. Around the same time, Deborah Chow and her crew started filming Obi-Wan Kenobi, which wrapped mid-September, mere days before The Mandalorian season 3 started filming, on the 20th. However, if Skeleton Crew is to wrap up by the beginning of November, that will only give Watts and his crew around four months of shooting, a much shorter window than The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett had, but similar to Obi-Wan Kenobi's, which shot for five months.



From the production start date we could also try to guess a release window for the show. The Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2 were released a year after the started filming (November 2019 and October 2020, respectively), and so was The Book of Boba Fett (December 2021). Obi-Wan Kenobi was released 13 months after principal photography started, too, and a late-Spring, early-Summer release date for Ahsoka seems to make a lot of sense.



The only exceptions are Andor and The Mandalorian season 3. The former shot twice as many episodes as Obi-Wan Kenobi did, and was in production for twice as long too, so it makes sense that rules don't apply there (Andor season 1 will debut on Disney Plus almost 21 months after they started shooting). The latter is aiming for a release date 17 months after cameras started rolling. We know that this season will be their biggest one yet, so it makes sense that it will take longer to finish post-production on it. Additional photography is rumored to take place this summer as well, according to another report from Bespin Bulletin, so that could explain a bump of a couple of months.







With all of this, a late summer, early fall 2023 release date would make a lot of sense for Skeleton Crew, depending on when Ahsoka is released and how much time Lucasfilm wants to have in between these projects. This also gives a late 2023 release date for The Acolyte next to no chances, so we shouldn't expect to see that series before January or February of 2024.



Of course, this is all pure speculation at the moment. With the series now in production, we should be receiving more news from Skeleton Crew in the next few weeks, including the names of the four young actors. Stay tuned!



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