Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau Address How ‘The Mandalorian’ Movie Will Handle Crossovers and Building Out the Mythology
Director Dave Filoni and The Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau discuss how the characters from the other shows (The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew) will be able to cross over into the forthcoming event film that will take the series to the big screen.
Talking with Entertainment Weekly, Filoni revealed that he and Favreau are still in the process of figuring out how their library of characters are going to intersect, though they’ve had plans for a big event like this for some time:
“We’re in the right area code! We are definitely in the right space. I think it’s going to be a clamoring of characters saying, ‘How do I get in this picture?’ And that’s what Jon and I have been figuring out.”
He noted that part of the interest in exploring this part of Star Wars history stemmed from a natural curiosity about what happened after the original trilogy, especially with the large narrative gap between it and the sequel trilogy:
“Growing up with the original [films], Return of the Jedi was the end, but then you’re always like: But what happens next? And then when Episode VII was set so many years later, when I was a kid, I never would’ve thought it would’ve been that much later, but it made sense. It created an opening where you go, ‘Wow so a lot of the things that we knew before are probably in there. How do we excavate that?'”
Jon Favreau also chipped in by saying with many of the show’s key players established, they have to figure out what the long-term story is going forward, citing Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces as the core inspiration for the storytelling that they’d like to follow:
“As we are getting deeper and deeper into this, you start to have to really map things out and figure out what that story is, and then have those characters fulfill what their growth cycle is and what their mythic hero’s journey is… That’s always been [George Lucas]’s base. He’s a student of Joseph Campbell. How does it fit into the narrative that has the hero’s journey? And so as we have more and more characters line up, you have to figure out how those characters are arcing and if it feels ultimately like a Star Wars story.”
Lucasfilm’s synopsis for The Mandalorian movie that they revealed earlier this month is as follows:
“Expanding upon Star Wars storytelling in the present, Dave Filoni will orchestrate the escalating war between the Imperial Remnant and the fledgling New Republic. Alongside producer Jon Favreau, they will bring together many of the threads of the Star Wars original series in a cinematic event.”
Three Star Wars movies are in active development: a “biblical epic” about the origins of the Jedi Order from writer-director James Mangold, a continuation of The Mandalorian and its spin-off series from writer-director Dave Filoni, and a new adventure starring Daisy Ridley’s Rey Skywalker set 15 years after the Skywalker Saga from director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and writer Steven Knight. No release dates have officially been set for any of these features, but Lucasfilm has reserved December 19, 2025 and December 17, 2027 release dates.
Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.
