This year there’s no big-screen Star War to look forward to as Christmas rolls around, what with the Skywalker Saga having wrapped up once and for all (or, for now at least). Thankfully, we’ve had weekly instalments of The Mandalorian to keep us all going instead – but with only two chapters left in Season 2, the future of Star Wars remains a little murky. The upcoming Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan shows remain somewhat in the dark, and there’s a slew of announced feature films – that lingering Rian Johnson trilogy, the Taika Waititi project, the one that Kevin Feige is attached to – that remain largely ambiguous and under wraps.
But that could change very shortly – according to the New York Times, Disney is about to announce “a significant expansion of the Star Wars universe” as part of an upcoming investor presentation, likely clarifying which films and series are concrete, and when we might expect them to arrive. It is thought that much of the call will focus on Disney+ streaming projects – also including a live-action Pinocchio starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto – as well as theatrical projects, which is the expected release avenue for the previously-reported Barry Jenkins Lion King sequel.
As it stands, plenty of Star Wars projects are said to be in the works for Disney+ – not just the ones mentioned above, but also one from Russian Doll’s Leslye Headland, and Dave Filoni’s upcoming animated series The Bad Batch, following the Clone Wars finale. Either way, we should apparently expect a “Death Star-size trove of coming content”.
With the investors presentation taking place today (Thursday) in LA-time, hopefully more concrete updates will be forthcoming in the next 24 hours. In the meantime, let’s all get our heads together and work out a plan of how exactly Mando can sort out the major cliffhanger from last week’s epic episode of The Mandalorian.