Jon Favreau Hints Characters From ‘Skeleton Crew’ Might Appear in ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 4
Over the last several years, live-action television has become an important part of the Star Wars franchise. The saga’s first such effort, The Mandalorian, debuted in 2019 to a largely positive response from both audiences and critics, and its success opened the door for more series to follow. Now, fan-favorites Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, who co-created The Mandalorian and are largely responsible for the franchise’s current TV renaissance, are actively developing several Star Wars series simultaneously.
The two writer/directors recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss their creative process, their shared love of Star Wars and its many influences, and what it’s like working on several large-scale productions at the same time. Along the way, Favreau also dropped some possible hints at future interconnectivity between the upcoming shows.
The two creators began by discussing how they like to pitch and develop story ideas together. They also talked about the care they have to take when working with so many characters and years of lore:
Favreau: “There’s so many characters in Star Wars and so many time periods that we’re often making charts of how things would intersect and how things would impact one another. But at the end of the day it just comes down to storytelling, us pitching each other ideas… We’re both writers, so we both go off and write on our own. And then we’ll contribute a scene or a punch-up. But really it’s more about getting the ideas going.”
Filoni: “We have the greatest toy box in the world in Star Wars and so many great characters. The challenge is actually not when you start. It’s where we are now, so many seasons in with Mando. So we don’t just have Star Wars history and lore that came before us. We have our own that have been built up just on The Mandalorian.”
Filoni then talked about Star Wars‘ many influences, some of which they’ve paid homage to in The Mandalorian:
Filoni: “Luckily, I think we like the same types of stories. When he was talking about Westerns at the beginning of Mando, I’m like, ‘Yup, I know these.’ And I’m like, ‘I want my episode of Ahsoka in Mando Season 2 to be like Yojimbo,’ and he’s like ‘I love Yojimbo‘. So we just talk in that language too, and that’s the way George and I always talked. We talked about movies.”
Favreau took a moment to touch upon many of the shows currently in various stages of development and emphasize the vast scope of the saga’s forthcoming TV offerings:
Favreau: “We have Ahsoka filming, often several episodes at once, with different directors. Skeleton Crew, which is Jon Watts’ and Chris Ford’s show, that’s going on several stages… And then Mando I’m doing editing and visual effects and writing. There are so many different creative nodes that are all sharing with one another, all around this world that George Lucas built.”
Filoni mentioned that he always strives to preserve “deep personal connections between characters” as he sees them as essential to the saga’s “heart”. He once again mentioned George Lucas as a major creative inspiration for his work on Star Wars.
Favreau then discussed how Jon Watts told him about his idea for Skeleton Crew while Favreau was filming his role in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which Watts directed. Favreau liked Watts’ idea, told Filoni about it, and they set up a meeting with Watts to talk about it further. It’s at this point in the interview that Favreau seems to suggest that he’ll be writing some of the characters from Skeleton Crew into the fourth season of The Mandalorian:
Favreau: “To have this young, Amblin-feeling movie with young people, who grew up in the Star Wars world and are exposed to adventure. The puppets, the costumes, the visuals, the world that’s being expanded upon. And now I get to write the next season of Mandalorian with all these new characters and new locations and new creatures… There’s this cohesive group of stories that are being told thanks to all these filmmakers that are contributing.”
To be clear, this isn’t official confirmation that we’ll be seeing the cast of Skeleton Crew interacting with Din Djarin and Grogu, but it’s obvious that Favreau is enthusiastic about the characters and ideas Watts has come up with for his show. Plus, it wouldn’t be the first time that Star Wars shows have crossed over with each other. We’ll just have to wait and see.
To watch the full interview, head over to Entertainment Weekly‘s YouTube channel.
Eric has been a fan of Star Wars ever since the age of five (or so) when his parents sat him down in front of a TV with pizza and a Sprite and showed him the original trilogy. He keeps trying to convince more fans to read the amazing 1980s Star Wars newspaper comics by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. When he's not reading, watching or playing Star Wars media, he's often enjoying other great fantasy and science fiction sagas or playing roleplaying games with his friends.
