Dave Filoni Had the ‘Ahsoka’ Story Conceptualized Years Ago, Cites the Expanded Universe as Influence for the MandoVerse
During Star Wars Celebration 2022 we got confirmation that the Ahsoka series will essentially act as the sequel series to Star Wars Rebels, but now in live-action. The animated series, created and run by Dave Filoni, concluded in 2018 with an epilogue that left the door open for possible stories in the future, by reuniting Sabine Wren with Ahsoka Tano before they embark on a quest to search for Ezra Bridger and Grand Admiral Thrawn.
In a new interview with io9, Filoni confirmed that, at the time, he didn’t know that future would be tied to Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian, but he certainly had some of the story thought out when he was putting together the epilogue. Said Filoni:
“At the time that I did the epilogue in Rebels, I had an idea of what this story would be. And it was definitely… so all of that, to just answer the question, I would say ‘Yes.’ It was definitely an option in my mind that, wow, this could be live-action if I go forward with this.
But there were a lot of things in that ‘if’. Which was can I tell the story as well? What does that look like? What’s the budget like? Who’s going to play these characters? There are so many unknowns. But it was definitely on the table as well as just continuing in animation.”
When asked why he decided for live-action over animation to continue the story, he added:
“You have to decide what’s best for the story. And I think, we found, you know, whatever my story is about [in] Ahsoka, I’m very pleased.
And, you know, I didn’t know Jon would be doing Mandalorian at the time when I did that epilogue. That was all in motion, but I didn’t understand Ahsoka’s role in it, certainly. But I do know this time period because I grew up with a lot of Expanded Universe material in it. And so I think that’s also been an influence on what the future holds for everyone existing post-Return of the Jedi.”
That’s as big a hint as we’ll get from Dave Filoni. The “Expanded Universe material” likely refers, for the most part, to Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy, which introduced Grand Admiral Thrawn into the Star Wars lore — Filoni would be the one to, 20 years later, insert him into the current canon, when he added him as the main villain of the last two seasons of Rebels. The character is expected to not only make the jump to live-action in Ahsoka, but also to play a pivotal role going forward in the stories told in the so-called “MandoVerse”.
In December 2020, Kathleen Kennedy spoke about all of the stories from the Mandalorian interconnected timeline would be leading into a “culmination event”. Said event has not been brought up since then, so its current status is unknown. Reading between the lines, it sounds like we could be getting some sort of cross-over from all of these series that would see the Rebels crew meet up with Grogu and the characters from Skeleton Crew, all together against Grand Admiral Thrawn and the re-emerging Imperial forces (a loose adaptation of Heir to the Empire in live-action). At the same time, Jon Favreau spoke recently about how he would like to continue to tell these stories for a long time, and how they have 30 years’ worth of storytelling to do between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so it’s unclear whether this event will be as culminating as Kennedy described — counterpoint to the counterpoint, Favreau has also cited the MCU as a huge reference for the way he approaches writing The Mandalorian and its spin-offs, so maybe we’re just in Phase 1 of the MandoVerse.
There is a lot of uncertainty, but within the next six months, we should be getting some clarification. Rosario Dawson let slip recently that she thinks Ahsoka will be coming out in the fall, after Haunted Mansion premieres in theaters (July 28). Whether she’s in the know or not is up in the air, but all things point to Ahsoka premiering in late summer or early fall. We expect to have a specific date announcement at Star Wars Celebration (small delays aside — the last three live-action Star Wars series have suffered last-minute small delays, as well as The Bad Batch, which was bumped a few months).
The Mandalorian is currently airing its third season on Disney Plus, with new episodes coming out every Wednesday. Check out Miguel’s review of Chapter 17 here.
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.
