This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Breaking Down Rumors of a Mandalorian Season 4 Movie, Looking Back at Disneys Investor Day Three Years Later

Happy Sunday, and welcome to a discussion-packed version of 'This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away', as I return from a five-day holiday break where I live. Did I miss anything while I was gone? As always, thanks to our readers who have been keeping up with my Sunday rants from week to week. Feel free to share with your friends or on social media if you enjoy it, and let me know in the comments! Today, we're talking The Mandalorian season 4, the Daisy Ridley-led Star Wars film, and the three-year anniversary of Disney's Investor Day 2020.



Before we get our hands dirty, a shameless plug. This week, I wrote reviews on our sister site MovieNewsNet.com for Netflix's Leave the World Behind and Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron. Check them out if you like! Also, SWNN Live! returned this Thursday to discuss in detail one of the topics that will be brought up in just a minute here, so feel free to give it a listen too! And now, on with the show...


<h2>Three Things That May Have Flown Casual</h2>

• Less than 24 hours after I speculated we might get in December some sort of announcement of what to expect next year in Star Wars, Disney Plus UK sent a press release confirming only two out of the five shows we thought we were getting, Skeleton Crew and The Acolyte. No mention of Andor season 2 (which Gizmodo says has been delayed until 2025 due to the strikes, like most of us thought, as well as the time needed to release the other two shows), The Bad Batch season 3, or Tales of the Jedi season 2. Will that be all we get this month, or is some sort of early look coming too?
• Also Coming Next Year: The retro PlayStation 1 title Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace appears to be coming soon to the PlayStation Plus Classics catalog. Also, a new Mace Windu novel by Steven Barnes titled Star Wars: The Glass Abyss comes out on August 6, 2024.
• Awards season: The Saturn Awards announced their nominations this week, including mentions of Andor, The Bad Batch, and The Mandalorian. Also, the Visions season 2 short 'Screecher's Reach' won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation.

The Mandalorian season 3 concept art.



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<h2>This Week, In Shocking News...</h2>


The Daisy Ridley-led Star Wars movie will not be starting production on a Sunday in April 2024, in contrast to what the film's page on ProductionList.com -- which hasn't been updated since April 2023 -- led everyone to believe (or at least those unwilling to think for two seconds before running a story on the Internet). All the signs, including the fact that the same website had just posted an incorrect start date for The Last of Us season 2 (interestingly, also on a Sunday), pointed to this being another fake rumor -- but we wanted to double check with sources regardless, at least to plant a flag. And indeed, the rumor was fake.



I do believe, however, that there was a chance that back in April 2023, when the page was supposedly last updated, the movie was targeting a spring 2024 start date. But that was back when Steven Knight was supposed to turn in his draft by the end of May, before the five-month WGA strike. That, followed by the actors' strike, pushed everything back. From our reporting in October, Knight should have submitted his first draft into the studio around November -- hence the 'script reportedly not ready yet' part of our tweet discussing this topic earlier this week.



I do believe the Lucasfilm leadership is going through it by now and will probably get back to him, director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and star Daisy Ridley either right before or right after the holiday break. So no, they are in no position to start filming, and I don't expect that to happen in the first half of 2023. Going no further, Ridley is currently shooting the Martin Campbell-directed, Die Hard-inspired Cleaner in London, and is expected to shoot We Bury the Dead in February in Australia. That, followed by the necessary months-long training, would add up to a late summer/early fall production start for Star Wars, at the earliest (Her Sundance pic Sometimes I Think About Dying is due out January 2024, and Young Woman and the Sea is currently in post, so look forward to more comments from her during those press tours).



With all of that said, should Lucasfilm be happy enough with the first draft of the script, early steps of pre-production like storyboarding and casting of top roles could start at the top of the year. While it seems too early for anyone other than Ridley to be attached, I wouldn't be surprised if the studio/director had a few actors in mind for some of the big roles in the film and were already engaged with them -- though they probably won't sign before they can read a script. Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again: John Boyega likely has an offer on his agent's table, and is probably waiting to read a draft of the script. How will his accepting or turning down the project affect the whole schedule? This is what worries me the most at this point.







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<h2>More Shocking News: The Mandalorian season 4 will be a movie?</h2>


This section was originally supposed to be highly ironic, putting the spotlight on the latest story that took the Internet down a crazy path. This week, however, we actually had some shocking news that requires a lot of discussion. On Friday, during the latest episode of The Hot Mic podcast, reporter Jeff Sneider (who co-hosts with John Rocha) dropped a Star Wars bomb on the Internet. He's hearing that, in the aftermath of the dual strikes, Lucasfilm is thinking about retooling the scripts for the fourth season of The Mandalorian and releasing the story as a movie instead. If so, that could become the next Star Wars movie out, even before the Daisy Ridley-led film we were just discussing.



Before we go any further, let me make something clear. From my understanding, this does not mean that the New Jedi Order-era film will be pushed back or is in any sort of trouble. At least not yet (we all know the history by now). Both projects are completely separate from each other, will be filmed in different places, and there isn't a lot of crossover between the creatives behind them. Should the Mandalorian movie come out first, that doesn't mean the Daisy Ridley film can't come out in May 2026 as we believe it was originally planned. However, keep on reading for some possible 'but's on this argument.



For the sake of discussion, let us assume this is true. For some of the reasons I'll lay down below, combined with the fact that we've heard crickets about a return to set for Jon Favreau and his gang (when most other major Hollywood productions have already announced their coming back date), I do believe the rumor.



(L-R): Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu in Lucasfilm's THE MANDALORIAN, season three, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. &amp; TM. All Rights Reserved.



At first glance, though, the move makes no sense. The Mandalorian is Disney Plus' flagship title, so one would think they want to have that running as long as possible. Even more so, there is not a lot of precedent to back up the fact that a movie following up a TV series could do the numbers that a Star Wars movie is required to do in theaters (the budget would probably be lower than the sequels', but still). There is clearly more than meets the eye here, so let's try to break down the different possibilities.



The most obvious explanation is that Disney wants a Star Wars movie out in theaters as soon as possible. The strikes forced them to push back several productions, and the easiest way out was to turn the already-proven The Mandalorian into a feature film. The show was planning to start shooting in October 2023 ahead of its likely 2025 release date, so everything was ready. But by reworking some of the scripts and removing some fluff, the Lucasfilm leadership might have thought the story worked just as well as a movie, which they can produce for a similar release window too. This is a well-oiled machine by now, after all.



We also don't know for sure that, should this even be real, the movie would come out in theaters. That's the logical assumption, but could this be a reaction to the mixed reception to season 3? Perhaps they've realized they need specific story beats from season 4 to continue the overall story arc of the New Republic era, and it was best for the overall franchise to just focus on those. Maybe they weren't confident in the rest.



Moreover, this could also be a case where they want to free up the production pipeline so that they're able to do both the second season of Ahsoka and Dave Filoni's already-announced movie in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe being on set for the first eight to nine months of 2024, assuming there isn't going to be another strike, was too complicated for them and their larger plans.



The Mandalorian



But I'm gonna run a crazy theory by you, that sort of combines all of the above -- let me know if I'm way off base here, or maybe I'm on to something! If true, this isn't the first major news coming from Star Wars within the past month, and I wonder if the two are related. When discussing the recent promotion of Dave Filoni (to Chief Creative Officer) and Carrie Beck (to head of development), I raised some concerns about neither of them having any experience with live-action feature films.



This issue, which also extends to the head of physical production, Momita SenGupta (aside from an early-career gig at MTV Films, a -successful- TV executive), could become a real problem if Kathleen Kennedy steps down from her leadership position at the end of her current contract, by the end of next year (or shortly after that). Therefore, I wonder if the company sees this as a training exercise for the soon-to-be leadership lineup and saw, with the constrained production timelines for the rest of the New Republic-era stories, an opportunity to put together a feature film so they can kill multiple birds with one stone: getting some experience with movie making for the top brass, have a Star Wars movie out in theaters by 2025 (like Iger had originally ordered Kathleen Kennedy, per another Sneider rumor earlier this year), start advertising the Mandalorian brand for moviegoing audiences and have them ready for the big, Dave Filoni-directed conclusion, and get ahead of the tentative schedules of other productions. Among other advantages.



I don't want to get too attached to the idea, and, truth be told, if this is true, it would feel like an appetizer for the grand return to the big screen that the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy/Daisy Ridley film will be in 2026. If they can put together the Mandalorian movie soon enough to start shooting in, say, March, perhaps they can wrap it up in under four months (previous seasons of the show shot for six to seven months during principal photography). Because Filoni and Beck are all over the place these days, it's hard to tell what they would focus on after that: would Filoni develop more New Republic-era stories, focus on the next feature films, other projects, or all of it? Feels like a lot, which is kind of why I was hoping he wouldn't get the job this soon. I hope I'm wrong.



Could The Mandalorian season 4 being turned into a movie have something to do with Dave Filoni and Carrie Beck's promotions?



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<h2>Three Years Ago Today: Begun, the Streaming Wars Had...</h2>


2020 was the year the Streaming Wars officially started, after some power moves between 2016-2019. The pandemic, along with the global expansion of Disney Plus and HBO Max (now just Max in the US), was Hollywood's equivalent of the end of Attack of the Clones. But we're in the Revenge of the Sith timeline now, as three years later, we've essentially crowned a victor, Netflix.



Looking back, there was a point of inflection in which Disney, whose combined services are the only real competition to the Stranger Things house, came out of the woodwork armed with nuclear weapons, ready to dump them on the battlefield. Today is the three-year anniversary of Disney's Investor Day 2020, that day in which the company announced its plans for what then seemed like the future of Hollywood, with tons of new programming all across their services. From previewing Only Murders in the Building, a new whodunnit starring Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez (which has now been renewed for a fourth season), to announcing a new Alien series coming to FX from Fargo's Noah Hawley -- a show that started shooting over the summer and will resume early next year.



Early on in that presentation, though, the House of Mouse made some jaws drop all across the globe when they announced ten new Marvel and ten new Star Wars titles coming 'over the next few years'. Ten?! (A few days later The Book of Boba Fett was confirmed through a stinger at the end of The Mandalorian season two, so eleven, actually.) Three years later, what does that look like?







It's a mixed bag. Kathleen Kennedy kept her word on some of them, like the Mandalorian spin-off Ahsoka, starring Rosario Dawson, or animated series like The Bad Batch and Star Wars: Visions. The Acolyte was announced then as the first pre-Phantom Menace live-action project Lucasfilm had ever done, and that show wrapped production earlier this year and will be coming out in 2024. Kennedy also announced then that Hayden Christensen would be coming back to the role of Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi.



But less than a year later, Kennedy confirmed that Rangers of the New Republic was no more -- possibly due to Gina Carano's firing early in 2021 following a months-long dispute (the actress was reportedly going to get her own solo series as well). Three years later, I'm still waiting for news on A Droid Story, a state-of-the-art animated feature coming to Disney Plus. (Not anymore, I guess?)



The big bomb, of course, was that Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman) was developing Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the studio, the studio's next feature film that would release on December 22, 2023 (!). Less than a year later, we heard that pre-production was put on pause and we understand that the studio then started to meet with other creatives. Another feature film that was discussed was the Taika Waititi-directed film, which is still in the works but moving very slowly. It had been already announced at that point.







Shortly after Rogue Squadron was put on ice, we believe Lucasfilm also changed gears on the Lando Disney Plus series, which was also announced on that December 2020 day. The show, Kennedy said, had enlisted Justin Simien (Dear White People) as showrunner. Jury's still out on what happened to this one, though, but it all points to Donald Glover not being satisfied with how things were going and waiting on Atlanta to wrap up to take over it. I remember being on alert in September 2021, when the fourth season of Simien's Netflix series came out, to try to spot any interviews in which he talked about Star Wars. It was crickets. Shortly after that, he was announced as the director of Disney's Haunted Mansion. Could Lucasfilm have taken a page on how the Glovers turned the series into a movie and applied that to The Mandalorian? Perhaps!



The recent book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios revealed that Bob Iger had forced Kathleen Kennedy and Kevin Feige in 2020 to announce projects they were still not ready to talk about. In Marvel's case, we now know that was the situation for Fantastic Four and Armor Wars, among others. But what were Lucasfilm's titles? A show like The Acolyte had been in the works for months, and Ahsoka was practically a guarantee. Taika's Star Wars film was announced in May 2020 and Rogue Squadron was not only ready, it was supposed to have been announced in the Celebration that never happened in August 2020.



I can think of two possibilities here: the animated feature A Droid Story, which has probably been scrapped by now, and the Lando series. The last one is even more obvious than the first. They had a showrunner attached and they even showed some concept art to investors, but I think the project was in such early stages that they hadn't even signed Donald Glover yet, which is why his name or the timeline in which the show would take place were never acknowledged (other than an image of the Solo-era Millenium Falcon). Remember that Lucasfilm hires people to develop ideas for them on a constant basis, and sometimes it's not ready to be announced. Case in point: the Guillermo del Toro-directed Jabba the Hutt movie that never was.



Another project that wasn't ready to be announced: the Dave Filoni-directed Star Wars movie that would culminate the storylines of the New Republic-era shows. Kennedy didn't mention Filoni's name or that it would be a film, but she did say that they were working on a 'climactic story event' that would serve as the conclusion to those stories. Clearly, that was just a sticking note on some wall at the Lucasfilm headquarters back then.



I really believe that day was a PTSD moment for Disney's multiple production companies, including Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar, and that it will not happen again. The stock price was boosted immediately after, but the long-range repercussions ultimately hurt the studio more than they helped it. Regardless, it's going to be another 18 months before the next Star Wars Celebration, so Lucasfilm will have to get used to announcing some stuff through some of Disney's upcoming earnings calls, or just drop press releases on us on a random Tuesday, and force me to have a heart attack while Star Wars News Net tries to cover them as soon as possible.







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No reading list this week, as I've been away and somewhat disconnected from what has hit the Internet, but do check out Josh's take on what we should see in the forthcoming third Star Wars: Jedi game. I'm still not reading, though, as I have not even cracked Fallen Order yet (one of these days!), but I know him well enough to be sure you'll find it really interesting if you are into these games!



I have read, however, Sydney's delightful love letter to Star Wars chess, dejarik. Share the joy!



What did you think of the latest edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away”? Let me know your thoughts and suggestions down below in the comment section. You can also send them, or reach out with any information tips, directly via our Contact page.



Have a great week!



Correction: Last week, I accidentally referred to the first Force Awakens teaser as happening ten years ago, as opposed to nine -- despite the fact that I mentioned the November 2014 window. <del>I blame Sydney for not picking it up when proofreading.</del>



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