Happy Sunday, and welcome to a new edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away“. I was about to start writing my weekly piece last week when posts started spreading on social media regarding Ewan McGregor having said at a convention he would be returning as Obi-Wan in Ahsoka Season 2. The stream of updates and roll-backs that happened over the following couple of hours left me so exhausted I decided to push it the piece until Monday — and then, as it happens, I had no time on Monday to finish it.
Sadly, we also have some breaking news to share from a few hours ago. Terence Stamp, the actor who played Chancellor Valorum in The Phantom Menace, has passed away at 87. May he rest in peace.
We’re in the heights of August, where there’s typically not a lot going on. And yet, it feels like the past 1-2 weeks have been the most eventful for Star Wars news in quite a while. We’ll be breaking that down today. But before we get to that, here are a couple of things you should check out.
First, Josh’s new Character Spotlight on Bode Akuna — someone I wasn’t super familiar with, having not played Jedi: Survivor yet. We didn’t have a new SWNN Live! show this week due to busy schedules, but Tyler did hop on last week to talk for 30 minutes about the latest in Star Wars news. Check it out here. And last but not least, you really must read this guest editorial on the parallels between Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett. I kid you not – it’s one of my favorite things we’ve posted in months.
Before we begin, a gentle reminder that you should join our Discord server if you want to have all the fun, chat about Star Wars, and so much more!
Three Things That May Have Flown Casual
The Andor Emmy campaign heats up its engines: The script for episode 9 of Season 2, “Welcome to the Rebellion” (by Dan Gilroy) is now available online — as is Tony Gilroy’s full pitch for the second season. Check them out here. Director Janus Metz also discussed directing episode 9 in a new interview.Build your own adventure: The beloved LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is releasing a new season next month, and this week, we got our first look at the new four episodes, which features a ton of known Star Wars characters, some of whom didn’t appear in the first season. Check out the trailer and poster here.Publishing updates: We’ve got new reviews out for the Sanctuary audiobook (by Sunny), Legacy of Vader #7 (by Sydney), the YA novel The Acolyte: The Crystal Crown (by Colin), Hyperspace Stories: Tides of Terror #1 (by Jay), and Jedi Knights #6 (by Nate). Also, old — and possibly new — Star Wars comics may soon be coming to Webtoon Entertainment.
Quote of the Week(s)
“We look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”
That was Disney’s best attempt at pretending they would hire Gina Carano again, after the wrestler-turned-actress’ wrongful termination suit was settled out of court. Yeah, don’t hold your breath for Cara Dune’s return. If they actually wanted her back, they would have said something a lot more definitive.
Runner-up
“So they over-cranked the camera to make it slightly slower because me and Ray were so fast doing this fight. He was worried that people wouldn’t believe it.”
Ewan McGregor confirmed in an interview this week that a long-rumored story about the Obi-Wan vs. Maul fight in The Phantom Menace had to be slowed down in post-production.
Speaking of Ewan…
As I alluded to at the beginning, there was this story last week about McGregor being misquoted, saying he would be in Ahsoka Season 2. This is not what he said, according to multiple outlets present at the Fan Expo Boston panel, though whether he will be in the show or not remains to be seen. His lifelong friend Hayden Christensen is returning as Anakin Skywalker, and so is his wife, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as Hera Syndulla.
The Status of Star Wars Films
It’s been a minute since we’ve done a proper check-in with the many Star Wars films in development, and given the stories from this past week, it feels like a good time to do it. If Kathleen Kennedy’s words a few months ago still hold true, Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter will go into principal photography next month. Casting is heating up at the moment, with Matt Smith recently joining the picture as an antagonist with a military background, according to reporter Jeff Sneider. He joins Mia Goth in the movie’s evil ranks.
But Sneider also said on the Hot Mic podcast what we can also tell by reading between the lines — Smith wasn’t Lucasfilm’s first choice for the role, and neither was Goth, who got the part after Oscar-winning Mikey Madison passed. Sneider said, and I believe him, that many actors have passed on this movie, though it’s unclear exactly why. The toxicity of the Star Wars fanbase is something to take into account, as Sneider and co-host John Rocha argued, but I also have the feeling that the script is not as solid as Lucasfilm would like to believe. I’ve had my doubts since the beginning about writer Jonathan Tropper, and this bit of information, if true, validated my concerns — after all, if the script was genuinely good, many actors would probably ignore the hurdles that joining the Star Wars franchise carries.
Despite that, the project will go in front of the cameras soon. There’s still a key role supposed to be cast, that of a young kid whom Ryan Gosling’s character is apparently protecting. Whether anyone has the part at the moment remains unclear, but it looks like it will most likely be an unknown. Sneider hinted that Adolescence star Owen Cooper and 28 Years Later‘s Alfie Williams were up for the part, but Lucasfilm passed on them.
Starfighter is the movie that the Lucasfilm leadership decided at the beginning of the year to focus on. I would imagine that it will be filming in the UK since next month, and the fact that The Batman Part II isn’t going until the spring, hints that Shawn Levy could be using the stages until February or March. If you remember, however, there was another movie that was in pretty good shape late last year — What ever happened to James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi?
The movie was shaping up to receive a major boost in 2025, given the addition of Beau Willimon as co-writer and Mangold’s freedom from his A Complete Unknown duties. And yet, the project seems to have been kept on the sidelines. So much so that Mangold has now been shopping a new package with Timothée Chalamet around town, one that David Ellison’s new regime at Paramount just bought this week. Will this be Mangold’s next movie? If so, what does it mean for Star Wars? As I’ve argued before about other projects, I wonder if this is a case where Mangold got cold feet because of Kathleen Kennedy’s imminent departure.
In parallel to all of that, Simon Kinberg is apparently still working on his Star Wars draft — one he was supposed to turn in to Lucasfilm back in June. Did he ever? We don’t know, but the writer-director-producer said this week that “I was super inspired and just sort of awestruck by what Tony Gilroy did with Andor. I thought that was about as good of science fiction storytelling as you can do in any franchise.” I don’t expect we’ll learn many more details about this new trilogy before the New Year, at the earliest.
But this past week, the Star Wars movie news didn’t just focus on future projects — there was a lot of talk about past movies as well. John Boyega, for instance, kinda dropped a bomb on us (like he tends to do), when he said he expected a Rey vs. Finn to happen at some point during the sequel trilogy, when they started hearing the ideas for The Force Awakens:
“I think I assumed he was Force-sensitive from The Force Awakens script or at least by the time I got to the end of The Force Awakens script. I thought they were planning dual Jedis. I actually thought that they would Obi-Wan and Darth Vader us a bit. That we would turn against each other or something along those lines.”
Finn’s Force sensibility, of course, was a big player in The Rise of Skywalker — or was it? Famously, it was one of the movie’s unresolved threads, the information that he really wanted to tell Rey but never got the chance. Boyega later clarified in the movie’s post-release press rounds that it was Finn’s Force sensibility that he wanted to tell his friend. That being said, I didn’t really get the impression that they were setting the stage for two Jedi. It was clear to me by the end of The Force Awakens that Rey was the protagonist of the trilogy and that the rest of the characters were there as supporting players to her story.
On a different note, Ron Howard also had some things to say about his time working on Solo: A Star Wars Story — or, more specifically, his time right before joining the movie. He explained how the project fell on his lap, and had nice things to say about collaborating with Phil Lord and Chris Miller:
“They basically said, ‘We’ve reached a creative impasse with Lord and Miller. Would you ever consider coming in?’ I looked at some edited footage, and I saw what was bothering them. There was a studio that liked the script the way it was and wanted a ‘Star Wars’ movie, but there was a disconnect early on tonally, and they weren’t convinced that what Phil and Chris were doing was working effectively.
“I couldn’t judge that because I didn’t see enough of it to know. But they were sure. Once I said, ‘Okay, I think I can do this script, and I think I understand what you want of this script,’ they said, ‘We’d want to reshoot a lot.’ I looked at the whole movie and then pointed out some things that I thought were great.
“And Phil and Chris were incredibly gracious throughout that process. They were just seeing two different movies. So I came in, I had a blast, but there’s nothing personal about that film whatsoever. It’s still just a shame. I can’t wait for Phil and Chris’s next movie.”
Interestingly, Lord and Miller’s next movie stars… Ryan Gosling! So that’s going to be an interesting press tour next year, isn’t it?
There’s a Walt Disney Studios Showcase panel at Destination D23 in a couple of weeks, but I don’t expect any Star Wars news to be announced there. We’ll still keep an eye out, though.
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!
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.