Jon Favreau Says ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 4 Will Not Be the End, Hopes the Story Will Continue for a Long Time
The Mandalorian season 3 is just a few days away as of the posting of this article, and Disney Plus is currently in the final stages of the pre-release marketing campaign. Besides revealing multiple 15-second spots over the past few days, Jon Favreau has also been doing the tour across Europe, visiting Spain and the UK, among other places, to attend Q&As and a variety of promotional events. During his time in London, Favreau also visited the London mural inspired by The Mandalorian, created by Jim Vision, and signed it. You’ll find images from the event at the bottom of the article.
As part of that final push, Total Film Magazine had a conversation with Favreau where they talked about some of the thought process behind the third season, his plans for future seasons, and also touched upon some of the upcoming spin-offs. What follows are some of the highlights from that conversation, but if you’re interested, make sure to check it out in full through the link above.
We know from the end of The Book of Boba Fett and the trailers for the third season that Grogu and Mando are now back together after spending some time apart, when the former was training with Luke Skywalker. One of the theories that has been floating around for some time (and which we even expanded upon in an editorial over two years ago), is that Grogu will eventually become The Mandalorian, bridging the gap between two groups that have been at odds with each other for the longest time. Favreau had this to say about Grogu’s place in the relationship between those two cultures:
“You have a character, you have two different cultures that – a lot of how the Mandalorian armour was described to me, as I talked to the people at Lucasfilm and Dave Filoni, is that one of the theories is that technology was developed in order to combat the abilities of the Jedi, that they don’t have these natural abilities but have to fight these in an asymmetric battle, and you have to be able to make up for what your deficiencies are. The armour was the thing that made up the deficiencies against the Force users. And yes, they were at war, but they also did cooperate from time to time, as we’ve seen. And then there were also characters like Tarre Vizsla that was both. Grogu seems to have the potential to have a lot of significance in bridging these two cultures and maybe he’s a character that can walk both those worlds. We will find out.”
The third season, as we know, will finally bring the planet of Mandalore into full force to live-action. We saw a quick glimpse in The Book of Boba Fett, but from what we’ve seen in the trailers, we are now going to spend some quality time on it. Favreau explained how Dave Filoni and his team did the heavy lifting of conceptualizing the planet during The Clone Wars:
“Dave and his team from The Clone Wars did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to the development of Mandalore. I found it very compelling that this planet was very desolate, not because that’s the ecosystem that had existed historically, but because there had been so many wars and civil wars and conflict between the tribes. And you have this warrior culture that couldn’t stop fighting amongst themselves, and so the planet was turned into a wasteland long before the Purge and the Empire.
And of course, when you’re fighting amongst yourselves, it makes it that much more difficult to face an outside threat. And so, it’s sort of a tragic history that this planet has, but also a romantic vision of what once was. We inherited the designs from Dave and his team, and then we wanted to show what happened and we make some allusions to the Purge of Mandalore; in The Book of Boba Fett we show a montage of the destruction. And now when we return to the planet we get to see in the stark sunlight what the aftermath of all of that destruction was.”
The question about season 3 possibly having jaw-dropping moments like the previous two seasons did has been raised a few times over the past few months, and every time, Jon Favreau has replied that all he wants for this show is to become a watercooler conversation, where people get excited about it and speculate on what could happen in the next episode. He reiterated those thoughts here:
“The goal is that we have enough things happen each episode that everybody wants to jump around the digital kitchen table and talk about, and argue about, and guess to what is going to happen next. So, I think the fun part of it is that it’s a big conversation and people are excited. And that’s part of what you get to do in television that you don’t get to do in movies; with movies, you build up to it, everybody sees it, everybody talks about it, and then they wait. And maybe another one [is released] a few years later. Here every week another one’s hitting. I like that we’re on Disney Plus where it’s each week is another episode, it’s not all dropped at once, so it allows for a back and forth. And I love to see if we guessed right, I love to see which ones the people react to better, and ultimately get the report card if we’re doing our job well.”
We also know that the fourth season is already in motion. Favreau said during an interview at last year’s Star Wars Celebration that he was already busy writing it, and in late 2022, he said that we should expect characters from Skeleton Crew to pop up in that. Then, in recent days, he confirmed that the work was now complete on the writing and that Doug Chiang was now drawing concept art for the scripts. In this interview, he confirmed that not only is the fourth season not going to be the last, but that he hopes that this story continues for a long time — in fact, he has no end in sight so far:
“No, I don’t [have an ending in mind] – I think the beauty of this is that it’s a middle chapter of a much larger story. And though we’ll have resolution over time with these characters, I think that how these characters fit into the larger scope and scale, but it’s not like there’s a finale that we’re building to that I have in mind. Quite the contrary, I love for these stories to go on and on. And so these characters potentially could be with us for a while, and I really love telling stories in their voice, and I love the way the adventures unfold and I’m looking forward to doing much more.”
Additionally, with two spin-offs from The Mandalorian coming up later this year in Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew, Favreau said that the intention of the teams behind all of these series is for them to be able to stand on their own, but also feed off each other, similarly to what the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been doing for around 15 years:
“So they’re not completely standalone, they do have a continuity to them, and we definitely do discuss and talk about how we flip these cards over and what’s available to us as storytellers from season to season. So I have to – even though we’re still refining and working on Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew and post-production, as I wrote season four, I have to have an understanding of where those cuts are going to get to and what they’re going to be like.”
He also said that Skeleton Crew will feel unique within the Star Wars franchise, but will not deviate enough from what we know and love:
“Yeah. It’s unique, in a way. But it also feels very consistent. […]
But at the end of the day, these are people who all love Star Wars. And so the primary goal is to make sure that we stay consistent within what people have come to expect. We stretch it here and there. We try to not just repeat ourselves, but in the way props are built, sets are designed, costumes are designed. And to show it on the backdrop of what it’s like for young people living in this world is very different than what we’ve seen from, let’s say, Luke Skywalker’s childhood and such. So there’s a lot of uniqueness to it, but it’s thoroughly delightful and enjoyable. It’s still in process, but I’ve seen enough of it to say that I think people are going to really, really connect with what they’re doing.”
The Mandalorian returns with new episodes on March 1. Ahsoka is supposed to be hitting Disney Plus later this year, during the fall if Rosario Dawson is to be believed, with Skeleton Crew coming right after at an unspecified time. We might learn the specifics during Star Wars Celebration, on April 7-10.
Make sure to come back for our review of the first episode of The Mandalorian season 3 next Wednesday!
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.
